This analysis addresses how Michigan school districts reported spending the $2.5 billion in Covid aid they received from 2020 through 2022. It addresses the dearth of information regarding the use of federal relief funds by analyzing state- and district-level expenditure data.
Across all three years, a total of $1.2 billion of Covid relief funded employee compensation. School districts did not primarily use this money to hire additional staff for student support. Rather, it appears they mostly used it to buttress the salaries and benefits of existing employees. Districts did spend more than normal on supplies and purchase services, both of which could have been used to deal with some of the effects of the pandemic on students.
Second only to labor costs, school districts spent the most Covid relief on purchased services and supplies. They used a greater proportion of Covid funding for these two categories than they normally devote to such expenditures. This suggests that the increased spending in these categories was an attempt to deal with issues arising from pandemic policies, such as school closures, forced quarantines, etc.
Charter schools appear to have spent their Covid relief funds somewhat differently, although there are limits to interpreting the data. Charters prioritized the use of Covid relief funds for additional instructional services, particularly compensatory activities. This suggests that charters focused some of these extra resources on mitigating the learning disruptions brought on by the pandemic.
The degree to which any of these efforts have helped students overcome learning loss and stabilize the classroom is difficult to quantify. Nevertheless, district and school leaders are still charged with the responsibility of shepherding their staff and students through a time of great disruption. And, while dollars spent do not always translate to success, following the money trail is one of the first steps we can take to determine what districts did to help students and to quantify the impact of such efforts.
All school districts must be held accountable to ensure that they did, in fact, allocate at least 20% of their funds to address deficits in student learning. With only half the money spent and one school year left to spend the remainder, there is still time for districts to dispense the rightful amount of Covid aid in support of closing these gaps. More robust reporting mechanisms will be needed to assess this. Especially since a designated portion of relief funds were specifically allocated for administering these monies, expectations of stronger reporting should not be too much to hope for.