COVID funding is ending for schools. What will it mean for students?

Billions of dollars in emergency education spending approved by Congress during the COVID-19 pandemic will be mostly gone next school year, leaving educators and policymakers scrambling to close the gaps.

Consider This host Scott Detrow spoke with Wall Street Journal education reporter Matt Barnum, who says schools were generally given discretion to spend it as they chose, as long as there was some connection to preparing, responding and addressing COVID needs.

With the abrupt switch to remote learning, social isolation and a global pandemic, kids were really struggling.

Peyton Chapman is the principal of Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon. Her school received some of the roughly $190 billion handed out by the federal government over the last few years to support K-12 education:

"We ended up, as schools, having to meet all the social services needs, increased homelessness, increased drug and mental health issues," she told NPR.

Now, many public schools could face a funding cliff when they return to classes in the fall.

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Schools say they needed the funding

Schools used those funds for lots of things, like:

• Targeted tutoring
• Extra time for teachers to meet one on one with students outside of class time
• Hiring additional staff to provide for the emotional needs of students
• Better technology 
• More aftercare programs 

Educators across the country say the additional funds helped students catch up, and Chapman says plenty of her students still need that support.

"Some, 90% even, of the students in my school as sophomores now seem to be bouncing back. But the 10% that really are struggling, are struggling harder and harder," she said.

With the funding ending, schools will need to reassess. That might mean ending some of that programming. It might mean layoffs. And it will almost certainly mean more work for the teachers who are, in many cases, already pretty burnt out.

Challenges for lower-income schools and school districts

Barnum says the money was distributed in a way where the school districts with the highest rates of poverty tended to get more:

"The logic behind that was that they faced greater challenges. Their students were more affected by the pandemic, both academically and otherwise, and there's some evidence to support that. But then that means they're also facing the biggest funding cliff, and they could face the most disruptions because of the loss of that money, especially if there isn't other money to fill that gap."

In other words, the students who got more help because their schools received a higher percentage of the funding will ultimately lose the most as the money goes away this fall.

But Barnum says the problem is, there doesn't seem to be much definitive evidence of how this particular federal money was affecting school performance.

"That is the $200 billion question. What did we get for this money?" he says.

"If you talk to folks in schools, I think many of them are going to say this was very impactful. This made a big difference. But some policymakers are like, 'Look, students are still behind academically. Did we really get a great return on this investment? Could this money have been spent more effectively?'"

Barum notes that the data shows students were still behind academically about a year ago. But adds, some have just started to make some gains. It's just that it's hard to see what extent that progress has to do with the COVID relief money, or what that would look like when it's gone.

This episode was produced by Erika Ryan and Connor Donevan, with audio engineering by Kwesi Lee. It was edited by Courtney Dorning and Jeanette Woods. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.