One of the biggest undercurrents of the post-pandemic years in education has been Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding.

Over the past three years, nearly $200 billion in pandemic recovery funds have been distributed to school districts nationwide. Split into three funding periods, the third and final swath of ESSER distributions is well under way. Schools have until September 30 to decide how to spend the funds and four months from that date to fully expend the funds.

That means by just after the mid-point of the 2024-25 school year, ESSER will be kaput. We’ll be sailing off of the funding cliff. What kind of landing are we in for?

Did the money make a difference?

The first thing to parse is whether or not (or perhaps the better way to put it is to what degree) pandemic recovery money that’s gone straight to school districts has made a difference.

You don’t have to look far for instances of money poorly spent. But the good news is a lot of districts put it toward sound initiatives that did lead to academic recovery. For instance, this piece in The Hechinger Report analyzed two independent academic analyses from just last month. The research they looked at found gains equivalent to “six days of learning in math and three days of learning in reading for every $1,000 in federal pandemic aid per student.”

Taking into account that high-poverty districts got an average of $7,700 per student, some quick math puts gains for some of our highest-need students at roughly 48 days of learning in math and 24 days of learning in reading.

The astute reader might already be jumping to a very fair, very valid conclusion. Those gains are modest. In many districts, the stark reality is that success has been simply getting students back to where they were pre-pandemic. In others, getting them merely near. Only in rare circumstances did schools both get their students back to pre-pandemic levels and accelerate them beyond.

It’s fair to question if the return on investment lives up to the expenditure. It’s fair to question why more schools weren’t able to do more with an unprecedented level of federal stimulus. But it’s also not fair to say ESSER funding is the same as flushing a whole lot of George Washingtons down the toilet.  

Where will the expiration leave schools?

So the money made a difference (even if it perhaps should have made more of one). That doesn’t change the fact that funds won’t be around much longer. It’s crickets up in congress about continued education spending in this vein.

A blog post from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) noted, “ESSER funds account for a significant share of current education dollars, which puts schools at risk of shortfalls when these funds lapse.”

Potential shortfalls are complicated by the reality that some states cut back on education spending amid the ESSER influx. In those areas, schools are in real danger as they won’t just be back at pre-pandemic funding levels. They may in fact be worse off than they were before the pandemic from a funding perspective. Thankfully, Indiana didn’t move in that direction. Statewide education funding has increased in recent years (even if, from my perspective, too much of our new spending went toward the private voucher program comparatively to public education investments).

That said, many schools across Indiana find themselves in a precarious position. As CBPP indicated, “In states that reported data, nearly 50% of ESSER III funds have gone to labor costs.” From what I can gather in looking at local districts’ ESSER spending plans, this certainly seems to be the case here. Teachers, counselors, admin, and other support staff are poised to lose their jobs, as so many outlets are warning. If schools are doing a good job of planning for this miniature doomsday, they’re being awfully hush-hush about it.

Programming and support services are also in danger. Take one local example. Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) invested heavily in high-dosage tutoring as a means of accelerating academic recovery from pandemic-related learning loss. In fact, they will have spent almost $20 million on this kind of programming by the ESSER spending deadline. In lieu of ESSER, it’s unrealistic to expect such robust investment in high-dosage tutoring to continue, even if the need remains clear.

Local ESSER funding amounts

It’s worth putting a fine point on just how much investment has gone into school districts across Indianapolis. The numbers (and I mean this neither pejoratively or facetiously) are eye-popping. Here’s what each of the 11 districts in Marion County received through ESSER (with all of them, except for Franklin Township, having at least some amount of funds left to use by the deadline).

• Indianapolis Public Schools – $217,450,412
• School Town of Speedway – $4,727,153
• Beech Grove City Schools – $9,297,863
• MSD Wayne Township – $57,931,844
• MSD Washington Township – $35,609,804
• MSD Pike Township – $36,979,086
• Perry Township Schools – $53,042,260
• MSD Lawrence Township – $46,264,266
• Franklin Township Community School Corporation – $11,788,479
• MSD Decatur Township – $19,181,460

Excuse me while I do some back-o-the-napkin figures. Ahem. Total Marion County investment through ESSER comes out to $492,272,627 million. Almost half a billion dollars just to Marion County school districts.

More on how IPS spent the money is here. But as you can see from those bullets, other districts saw massive investment over the past three school years as well. Two other two districts made the $50+ million club: Wayne and Perry. Staffing was a major focus for both (as it was for IPS). For instance, Wayne’s ESSER III application is chock full of staff position after staff position that, presumably, isn’t covered under their typical budget. The same goes for Perry’s ESSER spending overview page on their website. In a riff on that old saying to describe what holds up the world, it’s staffing all the way down. Those hopefully-friendly faces kids have become accustomed to in recent years? There’s about to be a lot less of them in Marion County school districts.

So we’re back to where we started. The ESSER funding clock set to September 30. Don’t look at your Gregorian calendar now, but that’s not far off. Schools are going to have to learn how to live without shortly. And it just might jeopardize the continuance of the academic gains that we’ve seen in the first few years following the worst of the pandemic’s disruptions.