A looming fiscal cliff created by federal COVID relief funding for schools is sparking talks of layoffs, program cuts, school consolidations, and other cost-cutting measures in states nationwide.
In Louisiana’s East Baton Rouge Parish school system, district officials have witnessed record surpluses in recent years made possible by $243 million in federal COVID cash the district has used to increase spending on payroll for administrators, prop up student transportation, expand early childhood education and hire literacy and math coaches for many schools, The Advocate reports.
But the federal funding ends this summer, creating what School Board President Dadrius Lanus described in a recent radio interview as a “$60 million fiscal cliff” at a time when the district is working to increase pay for educators by $6,000 and by $4,000 annually for support workers. The district spent $72.3 million in federal COVID funding in 2022-23, and $59.5 million this year, with some set aside for “indirect costs.”
Federal funding from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief fund “is sunsetting this summer,” Lanus said. “So we will no longer have those indirect costs and they will be rolling back into our budget.”
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While the district is on sound financial footing at the moment, “school leaders … are warning that leaner times are coming soon,” The Advocate reports. “Leaders are discussing job cutbacks, rolling back of programs and school consolidations to adjust to a potentially more austere financial climate.”
It’s a similar situation in Michigan’s Wayne-Westland school district, where district officials announced a massive $17.5 million budget shortfall “due to a miscalculation of COVID funds,” WXYZ reports.
“They’re playing musical chairs with teachers, displacing students, eliminating classes, interrupting the pattern of learning that’s going on with these students,” parent Jessica West told the news site.
As many as two dozen full-time and part-time positions will be cut by the end of the month, according to district officials who are also considering privatizing the district’s transportation services.
“We have been able to identify areas where change can occur without impacting the essential educational services being provided to our students and families,” district officials wrote in a statement to WXYZ. “As a result, Wayne-Westland Community Schools notified individuals of layoffs and restructuring in this effort to begin to right-size the district.”
There’s other talk of budget cuts coming from California, Connecticut, Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, Maryland, Tennessee, the District of Columbia, and elsewhere.
It all adds up to what education finance expert Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, describes in a recent report as “a perfect storm of financial chaos” for the nation’s schools.
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“This is going to be the hard year to really do our best work to make sure these public funds, which are expiring, bring value to kids,” Roza told WBAL.
A recent Edunomics report suggests “the ESSER cliff will be worse in high-needs districts,” and exacerbated by union rules that work against both best interests of students and efforts by school districts to diversify their teaching staffs.
“These budget gaps will prompt some districts to eliminate open positions (which tend to disproportionately impact high-needs schools) and make seniority-based layoffs (ditto),” the report read. “When junior teachers get pink slips, the workforce gets less diverse. All the budget wrangling takes the focus off student outcomes (and we know those gaps are wider for our neediest kids).
“The timeline for this tricky budget year is going to unfold quickly,” the report predicted.
The report predicts the bulk of the “bloodletting” will occur in September, the last month ESSER funds can pay for salaries and the deadline to sign contracts with vendors using the funds.
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