The flood of COVID relief funding now has some district leaders wondering if they will be able to spend all the money over the next few years.
This has created an ever-growing range of questions from administrators about how they can use American Rescue Plan and other ESSER funds.
While some uses are obvious, others may not be, said Tiffany Kesslar, an education lawyer and consultant with Brustein & Manasevit. For instance, can the funds be used to repave parking lots that were worn down by families in cars using school Wi-Fi while schools were closed?
Perhaps the money could be used to expand parking because a district needs to park the new buses needed to run the expanded routes necessitated by social distancing or to create an exclusive parking area for families using Wi-Fi.
The key to this question—and all others like it—is tying each proposed expenditure to needs arising from or exacerbated by the pandemic, Kesslar said during her Elementary and Secondary Education Act Network conference presentation last week. Around last Christmas, the U.S. Department of Education released updated ESSER guidance that said a project’s links to COVID could be less direct than specified previously by the agency. “The issue may not be because of the pandemic, but if you don’t fix the pre-existing issue it will affect your ability to emerge from the pandemic in a successful way,” Kesslar said.
Many administrators have had questions about using relief funds for staff pay, particularly for bonuses. It’s allowed as long as the bonuses connect to the impacts of the pandemic in some way. “You have to tie the bonus to loss of planning time or loss of breaks because, or because of COVID the staff has been doing X or Y,” Kesslar said. “It can’t just be we have all this money and we don’t know what to do with it, so we’re going to give everybody a bonus.”
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There are three broad categories that are eligible for ESSER funding:
- Supporting physical health and safety, such as developing strategies and implementing public health protocols including, to the greatest extent practicable, policies in line with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- Meeting students’ social, emotional, mental health, academic and other needs
- Operational continuity and other allowed uses
Those categories can include mental-health counseling, equity-building initiatives, enrichment programs, support for students with disabilities and stronger data collection. One change in the guidance allows districts to spend relief funds on projects that launched prior to the COVID outbreak in March 2020 “if it is a pre-existing condition that will impede recovery,” Kesslar says.
Ultimately, the guidance doesn’t mean districts can’t be creative. Administrators and their teams just have to build a strong argument for how an initiative will help a district bounce back from the disruptions of the last two years.
And on the question of whether districts will be given ESSER extensions? It’s possible, but not certain. “For right now,” Kessler advises, “keep spending, keep obligating, and do your best.”
