An investigation of ESSER spending by Georgetown University's Edunomics Lab, which researches education finance with the intent to inform policy, discovered that the majority of ESSER funds have gone toward labor.
“(T)hat's not totally surprising, because most of what education does is labor,” Edunomics Lab Director Marguerite Roza, who is also a research professor at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy, told Government Technology. “That can take the form of pay increases for people; it can take the form of new hires; and it can take the form of payment for stipends to add hours, let's say if you want to have some of your teachers lead a summer program. … So labor is one of the bigger items that we're seeing.”
Roza said that school districts on average have used upward of 60 percent of the ESSER funds in some kind of labor expense. Beyond labor, she said that around 30 percent goes into facilities improvements, including HVAC upgrades, which some experts say can impact student performance. Other funds, according to Edunomics research, included purchasing supplies like laptops and curriculum materials. Roza said that it’s hard to determine if the funds are being well-spent based on the information her lab is getting about the disbursement.
“The best way to measure if it's put to good use is to see if it achieves the desired outcome for students,” Roza said. “And one of the struggles with this federal relief money is that there wasn't an agreement on what the desired outcome was.”
While technology wasn’t a major player in ESSER spending, Roza said various tools helped cover for teachers when schools were short-staffed.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, there was a big burst of expenses on various technology and tool-based items, and in some ways, I think especially when the labor market was thin, districts were thinking about how they can use some of these tools to expand the impact of labor shortages,” she said.
At South Carolina’s Beaufort County School District, which used over $12 million in ESSER funds for software, devices and other tech tools, district spokeswoman Candace Bruder said stakeholders were part of the procurement process. Cybersecurity was a priority and has provided a level of comfort, she said.
“We are now better prepared on the cybersecurity front. We continue to value the input of our key stakeholders in the budgeting process,” Bruder said in an email. “We are able to implement e-learning days very quickly and efficiently. We look forward to seeing the different ways that our technology expenditures improve student learning.”
Two byproducts of the pandemic that have been major concerns among educators are chronic absenteeism and widening achievement gaps of students, Roza noted. She said that school districts need to take advantage of the resources provided by ARP to resolve lingering concerns created by the pandemic.
“There's an enormous opportunity here to use this money and really repair the gaps that emerged that will be lifelong for kids if we don't address them,” she said. “But we need some focus and urgency to make sure that we're getting as much value for every dollar as we possibly can. In every single district.”
Editor's note: A previous version of this story inaccurately stated that ESSER funds went toward the E-rate program. In fact, monies from the American Rescue Plan went toward both ESSER and E-rate, but the two are separate programs.
