State Superintendent Eric Mackey said Thursday that job losses could result from the loss of federal funds in the near future.

Mackey made the comments after the State Board of Education approved the department’s $6.4 billion Education Trust Fund budget request for K-12 schools for fiscal year 2026, which lawmakers will consider when the Alabama Legislature meets for the 2025 regular session in February. Lawmakers will have the final word on how much money is allocated.

Mackey said the request included a $52 million line item for “Struggling Readers Beyond Grade 3.” The superintendent, who did not give an estimate of jobs affected, told reporters that he thinks the number one use for those funds will be to hire reading interventionists.

“And a lot of it’s actually used, being used as replacement money, because they were hiring reading interventionists with federal funds,” he said. “Federal funds have gone away, and so they now want to keep their interventionists using these funds.”

Federal funds were provided to school districts and education through the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act of 2020 and the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of 2021. The funds, known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER), to address needs arising from the pandemic and for ongoing recovery efforts afterward.

Alabama received $3.28 billion in ESSER funds. , 91.55% of the money has been expended. Recipients had until Sept. 30 to commit ESSER funds allocated under ARPA.

Lawmakers

Rep. Danny Garrett, R-Trussville, chair of the House education budget committee, said Thursday he could not comment on the budget until he spoke with Mackey about the proposal.

Garrett said that they have talked for years about ESSER funds being temporary.

“So that’s been something that’s not unexpected, and hopefully systems have planned accordingly,” he said.

A message was left with Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, chair of the Senate education budget committee.

Mackey said they have given schools money for assessments and professional development, but there’s a missing piece with the interventionists, who work with students. Certified academic language therapists (CALT) provide intervention for students with written language disorders, including dyslexia,

“There are many of those children who have reading difficulties, but they qualify for special education services, so they have another layer of service,” he said. “But if they don’t qualify for special needs, then they don’t have that extra layer, and that’s where these CALT therapists come in very handy.”

Mackey said he has spoken with several superintendents who have the money to retain their interventionists but will not replace them when they retire. Other superintendents cut all of their interventionist jobs this year, he said.

“So, we’re going to see a little bit of both, I think,” he said. “Over the next three years, what we’re going to see is that they’re going to be fewer employees, basically in the system.”

He said they will regain some number of employees back with the Numeracy Act, which aims to set similar goals for math as the Literacy Act does for reading. The superintendent was hopeful schools would get more money for middle grade reading.

“As time goes they’ll be able to move to other jobs, but there’s just no way for the state to really sustain all the money, all the federal money we’re losing,” he said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com. Follow Alabama Reflector on and .

Washington school districts received over $2.6 billion in federal COVID relief funds and have spent $2.5 billion so far, according to from the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Like all other states, Washington received funds through three packages, known as ESSER I, II and III. ESSER stands for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, and the combined total for schools nationwide is nearly $200 billion.

The deadline for districts to determine how to spend the last of the money passed on Sept. 24, but districts do not have to actually spend the funds until Nov. 15. Washington is No. 1 in the country for spend-down rates, said Katy Payne, spokesperson for the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction.

“While most other states are seeking extensions from the federal government to spend the funds past the deadline…we have been clear with our districts to spend their funds down in a timely manner, and they have,” Payne said in an email.

Most states working with districts to request extensions are directing money toward facility costs, which aren’t necessarily important for helping kids recover from COVID learning loss, said Marguerite Roza, who heads Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, a research center focused on education finance.

“I’m not sure that would have made a big difference either way,” Roza said.

The Washington school districts that received the most funding overall include Seattle, Spokane and Tacoma public schools. However, the districts that received the most funding when broken down by dollars per student include Tukwila, Yakima and Highline, according to a

That’s because the funds were allocated using a formula intended to prioritize those with large low-income populations. Some districts, as a result, received nothing at all. The state also received ESSER funds — about an additional $279.5 million. That money went to learning recovery, student mental health, promote student reengagement and recruitment and retention of teachers with diverse backgrounds.

Roza said that Washington could have done a better job using ESSER funds for learning recovery. Other states, she said, pushed harder to ensure funds went to math and reading recovery, whereas Washington officials directed districts to focus on sustaining current operations and backfilling budget gaps, in part to ensure school staff didn’t lose their jobs.

“You saw state ed chiefs [outside Washington] really carefully scrutinize every plan that a district submitted and send some back and say, ‘No, I’d rather see you do more for your low achievers or your English language learners,’” Roza said.

Washington districts spent the majority of their ESSER dollars on the category of “teaching,” which would include expenses like hiring teacher’s aides, extending contracts for teachers, and afterschool programming staff.

“It was a missed opportunity to not try to leverage the ESSER funds to get kids back on track in math and reading,” Roza said, adding that that states that were more aggressive on reading recovery, in particular, are “already fully recovered from their COVID losses.”

The idea behind using funding to maintain current operations, said Ben Rarick, director of finance and operations at Tumwater School District, was to keep school systems intact with the assumption that enrollment would return to pre-pandemic numbers once schools reopened.

“A lot of districts used money to maintain programs so they’d be ready for that day,” Rarick said.

Enrollment never fully rebounded for many districts. With the focus on sustaining operations, Rarick said some districts with deeper pockets may have been able to use funds to focus on academic programs, like his district, whereas others may have had to use “every last dollar of ESSER money just to keep the staff they had.”

“I think that districts made a very good faith effort to implement high value programs for kids,” Rarick said. “I don’t place the blame on OSPI, I don’t place the blame on any individual district. It was really very specific to the circumstances of every district.”

The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction said that maintaining staff and programming was part of supporting students.

“You aren’t able to eliminate a teaching position because you had four students unenroll,” Payne said in an email. “You still need the teacher, the supplies, the support staff, the principal, the school bus.”

Payne also pointed out that Washington received less money than other states, which meant the funds “simply weren’t a big game-changer like they were in southern states.”

“That’s why it’s tough to make assumptions or assertions about how districts could have spent their funds ‘better,’” Payne said.

“How is it not focusing on academic recovery and acceleration to hire more [paraeducators] (who often lead tutoring programs in schools), start new before and afterschool learning programs, extend teachers’ working hours to support more students, and more?” Payne added.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Washington State Standard maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Bill Lucia for questions: info@washingtonstatestandard.com. Follow Washington State Standard on and .

Over the last three years, an influx of pandemic aid has been transformative for many schools.

Some were able to hire social workers or give every child a laptop for the first time. Others fixed up old buildings, tutored struggling students, or revamped summer school programs.

But that era is quickly drawing to a close. And this month marks an important stop on the way toward the end of COVID relief.

Schools have to say by the end of this month how they plan to spend the last of their $123 billion from the American Rescue Plan, the third and final batch of schools’ COVID aid from the federal government. Then they have until Jan. 28, 2025 to spend the money.

The deadline at the end of September matters a lot: Schools that have any money not earmarked by then could eventually have to return the funds to the federal government. And some states have said they are concerned that schools may be at risk of not meeting that deadline.

Schools can seek an extension to spend their remaining aid until March 2026. But that won’t give them more time to officially decide how to use it — leaving some scrambling to come up with a plan before the deadline in 11 days.

“We have been in contact, in many cases multiple times, with districts and charters to remind them of their responsibility to obligate these funds,” Tom Horne, Arizona’s state superintendent, said in a news release earlier this week. “Most are showing the ability to do this, but a number of them are at great risk of reverting funds.”

Some Arizona school districts or charter schools had yet to commit any of their funds to a specific purpose, Horne said, and many others have earmarked only a fraction of their aid.

Michigan said it expected some federal aid would be returned by schools, but noted it had left less than 1% of the first two aid packages on the table.

“We do anticipate that some school districts and subgrantees will not be able to obligate funds by the end of the month and may revert funds back to the federal government,” Jeremy Meyer, a spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Education, told Chalkbeat in an email.

Still, federal officials told reporters on Thursday they were confident that little if any money was at risk of being returned by schools. Schools across the country have already spent and been reimbursed for 87% of their American Rescue Plan dollars, officials said. Much of the remaining money has been spent, too, but hasn’t yet shown up on spending trackers due to record-keeping lags.

Schools can’t use the aid to pay staff salaries after this month. But they can continue using it to do things like pay tutors to work with their students, finish up a construction project, or contract with a community organization to help with attendance outreach.

Federal officials have said they would look especially favorably on applications to spend the money beyond the usual timeline on , such as intensive tutoring, efforts to boost attendance, and extra instructional time.

Delaware, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Puerto Rico have already applied for and received spending extensions on behalf of some districts and schools. These extensions cover some $1.1 billion in aid, federal officials said.

Several other states, including Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., told Chalkbeat that they intended to apply for spending extensions in the coming weeks or months.

Nationwide, schools have already spent about $1.5 billion beyond original deadlines after getting extensions on their first two aid packages, federal officials said.

Schools have struggled for a number of reasons to spend down their pandemic aid, though often not for lack of need.

Construction delays held up spending in Mississippi, . Meanwhile, supply-chain issues slowed spending in Tennessee and Illinois.

In Colorado, some schools had trouble filling certain educator positions amidst national shortages, or they planned to hire a company to provide training and were still waiting for that service to come through, Meyer wrote.

In other cases, not as many students or staff showed up to certain activities like summer school or after-school programs as originally anticipated, so they ended up costing less than expected.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Michigan’s public schools have billions of dollars in emergency COVID-19 federal funding to spend — but they may be in danger of losing some of it if it goes unallocated by the end of September.

In 2021, President Joe Biden signed a stimulus bill that pushed funding into communities to help address economic challenges posed by COVID-19. The American Rescue Plan included funding for schools and education agencies.

Michigan in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding in 2021, on top of previous, smaller stimulus checks. In total, the state has over $5.6 billion in federal funds to spend on education projects. The 2021 money must be allocated to schools or state education agencies for a specific project by Sept. 30.

But some Michigan districts and agencies may be in danger of not meeting that deadline and losing the funding, according to .

A (DOE) indicates there is $740.4 million remaining for schools to reimburse. While some schools may have already spent their allocated money without receiving reimbursements, there are probably millions of dollars left available for claiming in the next few months.

Local educational institutions, or public and charter schools, were allocated a bulk of this money. Public schools that received the federal funding ” caused by the pandemic, in addition to addressing inequalities that were exacerbated during this period. This could look like additional after school or summer programs for students, something educational advocates have .

Additional ESSER money can be used for other health and education-related projects, including work-from-home or classroom technology, additional staff, improved air quality and mental health services.

Addressing long-term challenges

The one time payments may be difficult for schools to find projects for because they will only receive the funding once, according to Anne Kuhnen, the Kids Count policy director for the Michigan League for Public Policy. For example, if a district hired a mental health professional and paid their first year salary using the stimulus check, the district would have to use its own budget going forward, since the federal funds are not recurring.

“Expiration of the funding will be especially difficult for those districts that felt as if they had no other choice than to use some of the funds for recurring expenditures—and didn’t plan or plan well for this moment,” Michigan State Superintendent, Michael Rice said in a .

Michigan children were not exempt from learning challenges during the pandemic. Grade schoolers are less proficient in key subjects like math and reading than they were in 2019, before the pandemic, according to from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. In the same report, Michigan received its lowest education ranking in 35 years. Michigan ranked 41 out of 50 states for education in the 2021-22 school year.

Biden’s stimulus plan hopes to address some of these academic challenges, especially as the economy could struggle with a new workforce that is not equipped with academic proficiencies.

For example, students in the United States enrolled in K-12 education during the pandemic could collectively lose $900 billion in income if math proficiencies continue to be low, according to a study from the . This is attributed to the correlation between increased earnings and rising math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in the thirty years prior to the pandemic.

Additionally, predicts Michigan students will make roughly 5.4% less than if there had not been a pandemic due to learning loss. This could contribute to a loss in overall gross domestic product, the dollar amount of goods and services produced, of around $300 billion for Michigan.

The researchers of the study from Hoover Institution, Eric A. Hanushek and Bradley Strauss, write that much of the ESSER funding has been used for additional tutoring or education time for students to combat learning losses, but the best way to attack the problem would be through incentives for teachers to “take on more demanding classroom tasks.”

Rice said Michigan’s last two helped with pandemic and pre-pandemic era issues in the state, like the teacher shortage. He said recurring funding from the state budget will help address challenges like lack of literacy, transportation and teachers long-term.

“That’s not to say that we are where we need to be from a funding perspective,” Rice said. “It’s simply to say that we’ve made huge strides in the last two years, in the last two budgets, and I anticipate that this budget, we are going to make significant strides as well.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan J. Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on and .

The administrators of the Hartford Public Schools system have a problem.

Left with a nearly $37 million budget hole despite pleas for more local and state funding to plug holes left by the expiration of federal pandemic aid, they will, in the coming weeks, sort out the details of eliminating close to 400 positions and decide which programs to cut back this fall.

The Bridgeport school district, on the other hand, will avoid massive layoffs this year — despite the loss of its federal funding — by using most of its roughly $36 million in reserves to help close its own deficits, leaving the district in a precarious position next spring.

New Haven’s school system also will avoid staff cuts this year — although with an expected $12 million deficit, the district will have to make some tough choices in the coming weeks to balance the budget that goes into effect July 1.

Waterbury’s school district, meanwhile, is looking to hire more staff and has sidestepped the problems plaguing the state’s other large urban school districts, mostly by not hiring permanent staff with the millions in federal pandemic aid schools have received over the last several years.

Yet the district conceded it will still have to pull back at some point on COVID-funded programming, as most school districts will, once the money dries up later this year.

Whether it’s the loss of a favorite teacher, cuts to services like tutoring or mental health support, or even the complete shutdown of their school, almost every public school student in Connecticut will feel some type of impact from the expiration of federal pandemic relief funding.

For several years, Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds, known as ESSER,  to school districts across the country. Beyond investing in academic recovery efforts, schools have also used the funds for innovative teaching programs, school upgrades and temporary contracts to fill staff vacancies. The expiration of the funding on Sept. 30 is  that are expected to lose between hundreds of thousands up to tens of millions of dollars.

In Connecticut, urban hubs have already been , and now they’re also most likely to bear the brunt of a painful transition period with budget deficits that may climb upward of $40 million in upcoming academic years.

“This and next year are going to be particularly hard. There’s not enough funding coming in from either the state or local level to make up the difference of expiring federal aid, so as a result you’re going to see either staffing cuts or programmatic cuts,” said Michael Morton, the deputy executive director for communications and operations at the , a nonprofit policy organization. “You’re going to see that in [all] districts, but the hit’s particularly hard in urban districts that .”

Hartford public schools received over  and are facing a $36.8 million budget deficit this fall as the money runs out. That equates to the potential elimination of nearly 400 positions, the possibility of nine school consolidations and program reductions to things like initiatives that targeted getting chronically absent students back into the classroom.

Problems on top of problems

The expiration of ESSER funds is another hit to Connecticut urban school districts that have already faced decades of funding woes.

“When we look at the problems that districts are facing for budgets, yes, a big part of that is the expiration of ESSER funds. A big part of that [also] is higher student needs where there’s more students who are coming to school living in poverty. There’s more students who are multilingual learners and need additional supports. There are more students who need special education services — that all adds up,” Morton said. “But what the root problem is, is the systemic inequities that have gone on for generations and generations and generations.”

Local municipalities account for  of their public school funding, so the underfunding of city districts was inevitable after being plagued with limited taxable property in addition to the concentration of low-income households.

In 2019, the state government created a  in which, on top of a flat block grant, districts could receive additional state aid based on student need, including extra support for low-income and multilingual learners.

In recent years, education has become a top priority for “,” Education Committee co-chair Rep. Jeff Currey told The Connecticut Mirror earlier this year.

This prioritization led to legislation that  of the Education Cost Sharing , which is how the state distributes funding to school districts. Other legislation also  how much a public school district has to pay in tuition expenses to magnet schools when a student enrolls. The magnet school tuition cap is expected to save local districts millions of dollars.

The efforts are expected to increase overall revenue in most Connecticut school districts and allow those with high enrollment numbers in magnet schools to net savings.

In Waterbury, the district won’t have any cuts into the upcoming school year, thanks to savings they’re anticipating from the magnet tuition cap and a $19.2 million increase of state grant money, Waterbury Mayor Paul Pernerewski told the CT Mirror.

Despite existing efforts, superintendents and city leadership from Waterbury, Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven, state lawmakers and other education stakeholders all agree that the conversation and recent investments toward making Connecticut schools more equitable is just beginning.

Next year, several stakeholders plan to push for the state to fully fund choice schools rather than leaving the burden to fall on public school districts. There’s also advocacy for including special education as a weight in the school funding formula and the expansion of the  because cities disproportionately have tax-exempt properties, and property taxes pay for schools.

But before looking to the 2025 legislative session, districts have to focus on their budgets now.

The CT Mirror spoke with education leaders in the state’s four biggest districts about how they plan to move their schools forward with already historic underfunding, in addition to navigating a major cut in revenue.

Hartford: Nearly $37M deficit will mean hundreds of staffing cuts

Hartford public schools may be the worst off district in the state, making  for a $36.8 million deficit and the possible elimination of 384 positions in the budget that goes into effect July 1.

Of those roles, over 230 were temporary contracts funded by federal relief dollars. 

Temporary positions included social workers, paraeducators, resource teachers, student engagement specialists and family community school support providers.

The district also plans to remove 84 job vacancies and is planning for dozens of layoffs of both non-certified and certified staff, but the situation remains fluid as the numbers haven’t accounted for retirement and resignation notices yet.

Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez says she’s aware of the criticism over how the one-time funds were spent on staffing, but she said it was the right move for the district and its needs.

“What else was I going to invest in?” Torres-Rodriguez told the CT Mirror. “We had investments in HVAC systems, and curriculum, and things that are going to be with us for the long term, but our students needed to get caught up — to recover academically, emotionally. Our educators needed support. We needed to leverage the resources that way.

“If I had the money and the money came tomorrow, and we had the need, I would do it all over again,” Torres-Rodriguez said.

The district’s central office is expected to decrease staffing by about 16.5%. Meanwhile, school staff reductions are estimated at about 11.2%.

Despite a massive staffing overhaul and program reductions, Torres-Rodriguez said “art, music and athletics will be guaranteed at our schools,” and that there aren’t any plans to reduce success centers at the district’s comprehensive high schools, which provide additional support to help students graduate.

“We’re seeing great progress in our students that were either disengaged, needed additional time or smaller settings of support,” Torres-Rodriguez said, hopeful that this June the district may see its highest ever graduation rate thanks to investments from the COVID-19 funding.

In a presentation to the state Board of Education’s accountability and support committee in mid-May, Torres-Rodriguez acknowledged that COVID-19 funding is a “present issue,” but “it is long-term fiscal challenges that necessitate significant change in how we operate.”

“This is a really complex layer after layer,” Torres-Rodriguez said. “There’s the flat stagnant funding [from the city], then you overlay the school choice ecosystem, then you overlay declining enrollment, then you overlay the higher concentration of need that exists in communities that have been under-resourced, then you overlay the fact [the increase of] our special education rates. … When you look at these things long enough, you begin to see patterns [of inequities] and the root causes of it.”

Since 2018, the city of Hartford’s contribution has remained around $95 million, despite increasing expenses for things like special education, declining populations in traditional public schools but higher enrollments in choice schools (which means a larger amount of the budget being paid into tuition) and inflation in general.

“Any revenue that we would have from students that come to us from other districts, we just funnel it right back out,” Torres-Rodriguez said, adding that she hopes the state considers a better reimbursement model for districts with large populations of high-need students and with high concentrations of choice schools.

For weeks, advocates have organized rallies, protests and groups to speak at public meetings to criticize an increased budget for law enforcement while the school system has received flat funding and continues to struggle.

The city’s budget, approved on May 21, increased funding for the police department by 3.4%. 

“It’s a sure sign of systemic racism that the city whose demographics are predominately Black and brown chooses to prioritize policing them rather than educating them,” said Adam Bulmash, a Hartford resident, social worker and member of the Hartford Jewish Organizing Collective at a city budget public hearing in May. “This is not how you improve our city. We know for a fact that these cuts are going to result in fewer teachers, overflowing classrooms, poor learning outcomes and inattentive care for our higher-need students.”

The efforts helped the district’s projected revenue increase from $429 million to $435 million after the state contributed an additional $5 million and the city absorbed a $1 million expense for crossing guards.

Future conversations within Hartford Public Schools about sustainability will start to shift and focus on school consolidation and program innovation.

The superintendent said the district needs to “take into consideration the entire ecosystem,” which means shifting resources to make sure schools are balanced — particularly looking at elementary and middle schools that have enrollments of 320 or fewer students and considering the closure of nine schools.

“There’s less economy of scale that way where with [a higher number of schools] we’re less able to offer more,” Torres-Rodriguez said, adding how  considered how schools within the district had significant disparities in the number of course offerings, after-school programs and other resources.

“Right-sizing [isn’t] just about what we could save, to put back into the budget and mitigate, it’s also about having to do right by all of our students. We have to have opportunities and conditions for all of our students to have access,” Torres-Rodriguez said.

Bridgeport: Draining its reserves to close a deficit

The Bridgeport Public Schools system has balanced a $309 million budget entering the 2024-25 school year after addressing a $41 million deficit with new revenue from additional state grants and the magnet school tuition cap, closing vacant positions and draining its reserves.

The question now becomes whether Bridgeport is prolonging what many believe is an inevitable fiscal cliff, which could mean an approximately 10% budget reduction in FY2026, according to Joseph Sokolovic, a longtime member of the Bridgeport Board of Education and former board finance chair.

“We’re going to exhaust our entire internal service fund this year, our internal savings and the fiscal cliff will hit in ’25-26,” Sokolovic said. “We got 12 to 15 years of escalating costs in the normal course of business, plus we got the ESSER funded positions that we’re keeping that we did not have prior to ESSER … so we’ll have approximately $39 million of need for next year with no savings to cover if all things remain equal … as far as increased funding.”

Sokolovic is anticipating more school closures and staff cuts in the 2025-26 school year.

Despite requesting an increase of $16 million, the district is receiving only $3 million more from the city than the previous year, bringing the city’s total contribution to $78.5 million in 2024-25. The district is also anticipating a $9.2 million increase from the state and $700,000 of savings from the magnet school tuition cap.

“Unfortunately, it’s not enough to prevent the upcoming fiscal cliff, which we expect to occur in fiscal year 2026,” said Patricia St. Louis, the district’s interim chief financial officer at a local board of education facilities and finance committee meeting on May 20.

The district is anticipating to close this fiscal year with a $6 million to $8 million shortfall and will use some of its roughly $36 million of reserves to balance its existing FY24 budget.

District leaders initially planned to withdraw another $12.8 million from the reserves fund if its municipality contributed the full $16 million request. However, with only $3 million of that request being allocated to the district, it plans to withdraw even more.

The district, between balancing the FY24 and FY25 budgets, plans to strip about $32 million out of its reserve fund.

“This will leave us with only $4.5 million in fiscal year ’26 to rely on,” St. Louis said, adding how that’s the required minimum amount to have in the account. “It is projected that that operating budget gap will reemerge due to historical underfunding in the Bridgeport operating budget.” 

Trying to get ahead of the deficit, Superintendent Carmela M. Levy-David said the district has “identified many areas when it comes to instructional resources where we can save a great deal of money” at a board of education meeting in late May.

It starts with her commitment to the school district, where she said she intends to stay for several years to come.

“I am the fifth superintendent in seven years. … School districts that have constant superintendent turnover will have higher rates of chronic absenteeism, higher rates of student failure, higher rates of financial insufficiency and higher rates of attrition with their staff,” Levy-David said. “We have to begin by right-sizing and stabilizing the way that we do organizational leadership in Bridgeport, the way we use the resources that we already have, the way that we use the funds that we are given differently so that we are not constantly in a spending and rescue mode that has been the culture of Bridgeport for the last 20 years.”

Equitable staffing is next.

“We don’t staff based on the needs of the school or based on the level of challenges and issues that are apparent in the school. Everybody gets the same no matter what, and that is not a formula for success. That is not the way that it has been done in the last 10 years in successful school districts,” Levy-David said. “Those are things that we now have to actualize and modernize in Bridgeport in order to stay with the trends that actually help to improve our retention of quality staff and also our ability to ensure that the systems that we build are scalable and sustainable.”

As for its funding woes, Levy-David said the district has recently hired a grant writer to capitalize on its high enrollment of multilingual and learners with special needs. 

“We qualify for everything, but we have simply not been competing for very substantial educational grants at the state and federal level,” Levy-David said, adding that the district also hopes to decrease its special education costs through more efficient transportation that could net savings in excess of $10 million.

“The systems that we’re putting in place are going to ensure that we can stabilize and actually lead this district to a completely new era of stability for the next 10 years. I have committed to being in this district for a decade,” Levy-David said. “I believe that this work is attainable. … We know the process of transforming school systems into being successful solvent school systems. We just need the opportunity to do the work.”

New Haven: Anticipates $12 million deficit, but no layoffs on the table

Unlike several of its urban counterparts, the New Haven Public Schools system hasn’t seen a history of flat-funding from its municipality — which plans to invest a total of about , a $5 million increase into the school system.

But the school district requested $77.6 million, or a $16.8 million increase, which is an amount some stakeholders say was simply to “keep the lights on” and maintain its current operations. The difference would leave the district with a $12 million deficit in its $345.5 million budget for the upcoming school year.

“It’s going to put us at a distinct disadvantage as we’re preparing for the upcoming school year and beyond. … We know that with increased need comes a need for an increased budget, and now is the time to ensure students have what they need. Now is not the time to fall backwards,” said Leslie Blatteau, union president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers. “[Our superintendent’s] proposed budget was going to keep the lights on. I suspect there are going to be hard decisions that are going to have to be made if we end up with the status quo of the mayor’s proposed $5 million.”

Blatteau, joined by several other educators and students, rallied on May 24 for the full funding of their school district to particularly target an increase of multilingual learners and student mental health needs as well as making upgrades to school facilities.

Even facing a multimillion-dollar deficit, Blatteau and Mayor Justin Elicker both told the CT Mirror that cuts to certified staff are not on the table.

The district didn’t allocate much of its federal relief funding to full-time staffing because “we anticipated this problem and didn’t want to face a cliff where all of a sudden we would lose funding and have to do layoffs,” Elicker said, adding there were some hires to part-time and supplemental staff. 

Other relief funds went to infrastructure improvement and the expansion of the district’s summer school and after-school programming, which will likely be reduced as the money runs out.

“We [funded things like] dropout prevention specialists that go out in the community and identify why students aren’t in school and try to get them in school,” Elicker said. “If we go in the wrong direction by cutting after school programs and other initiatives, … we’re gonna have even more problems. What we need to do is just the opposite — it’s to have more supports for our young people.”

Elicker acknowledged that “public school needs is well above” what the district is asking for in its budget but said that the tax base model makes it difficult for the city to invest further.

“We’re spending much less per child than many districts out there,” Elicker said. “With a tax base where effectively half of our properties in New Haven are non-taxable, we’re relying on people that are not wealthy to fund our schools. We struggle to collect taxes.”

In an effort to make up extra revenue, Elicker said, the city is raising taxes by 4%.

The district also is analyzing its transportation costs and working on the “right-sizing of our classrooms” by balancing school enrollment better with “slightly higher teacher-to-student ratios,” Elicker said.

District leadership also plans to “explore the potential of school consolidations” in 2025-26.

Waterbury: A balanced budget and looking to hire

Waterbury is entering the 2024-25 school year with a different problem than that shared by Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven.

“There’s no fiscal cliffs here,” Pernerewski, the city’s mayor, said.

Despite flat-funding from the city since 2017, the district has balanced a budget of around $295.5 million that’s being carried by increases in state funding, , which are the lowest-performing districts in the state.

“For FY25, the City expects to receive an ECS grant in the amount of $190.4 million based upon the State’s FY24-25 Adopted Biennial Budget,” . “This is $19.2 million more than the anticipated FY24 ECS grant. The non-restricted portion of the ECS money reflected in the General Fund is $113.6 million. This base amount has remained stable for many years. The Alliance portion of the grant, which is awarded directly to the Board of Education, is expected to be $76.7 million.”

The district isn’t considering any type of staff reduction or school consolidations but is rather looking to hire and expand.

“We need about 100 more teachers in Waterbury, and not that we’re hoping anybody faces fiscal problems, but I think there’s a part of us that thinks that if some school districts are laying off teachers, we may be able to benefit from that and that we can try to hire some of those teachers here,” Pernerewski said.

Waterbury’s ESSER funding was mainly spent on “larger capital projects,” like HVAC systems, school renovations and playground updates, Pernerewski said. 

“Waterbury has done a really good job of being very prudent with its ESSER dollars,” Pernerewski said. “What we did was avoided bonding in a lot of cases over the years from projects that needed to get done, and we’re able to use those dollars for that, which was the savings, because we don’t have the bonding costs moving forward.”

The district also used a “considerable amount” of its budget to focus on “academic acceleration” and tackling anticipated learning gaps from remote learning. These initiatives included access to 24/7 tutoring, Superintendent Verna Ruffin said.

The district has no plans to “eliminate” those programs either, though there may be some reductions in the 2025-26 school year to the tutoring program, socio-emotional support and other COVID-funded initiatives.

“We’re looking to see if [we] can get grants to sustain some of the programs that we started,” Ruffin said, adding that there will not be any type of reductions to special education, pre-K, kindergarten or bilingual programming services.

Advocacy efforts at the state level

There was no right way to use ESSER funding, Morton said.

“I think in everything that we’ve looked at, districts have spent the resources in a way that they thought was best to address the needs of the student population that they have — and that’s going to differ from district to district,” Morton said.

The conversation will soon shift back to lawmakers and what the state can do to continue pushing its historically underfunded districts forward.

For Rep. Maryam Khan, who represents parts of Hartford, Windsor and South Windsor and serves on the Education Committee, there are three funding priorities on her agenda that are “rooted in discrimination” and that she hopes to change.

Khan said much of urban schools’ budgets go toward paying tuition for sending students to choice schools, particularly magnet schools. She hopes initiatives this year will put those fiscal responsibilities on the state.

“The state has created these choice schools, and if the state has created them, the state should fund them and not put that burden on the town and cities to fund them,” Khan said. “We really, really have to start looking at that equitable distribution of resources.”

Khan and Rep. Ron Napoli, D-Waterbury, both touched on the cost of special education, which is one of the highest costs for school budgets, but receives limited or no reimbursement from the state.

There’s a push from advocates for the state to provide an extra weight for school districts so they can receive more funding when they have high enrollments of students with disabilities.

“[Special education] is something that we will always look at and try to find a way to get districts to a better place and making sure that school districts are reimbursed so our special needs students can really get the services they need,” Napoli said.

“Most states do have funds for special education and reimbursement. I think we’re one of the only two states that don’t have any room for special education costs,” Khan said. “This is going to be of the biggest things I know I’m going to be pushing for.”

Khan also mentioned expanding the PILOT program that sets payments for tax-exempt land owned by the state.

“That’s one thing that I really want to look at beyond just education. Our cities need more revenue, and they are losing revenue because so many things are non-taxable [like hospitals, schools and churches],” Khan said.

Education Committee members Sen. Doug McCrory, D-Hartford, Rep. Antonio Felipe, D-Bridgeport, and Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, did not respond to requests for comment about their districts’ funding struggles or initiatives for the upcoming legislative session.

But those days are over. Thinking of quitting in the next few months or years? Think twice. Because odds are you’ll have a tough time finding another education job in the next several years.

That’s because the job market for teachers is about to do a U-turn with the hiring spree of the last few years set to stall out before coming to a screeching halt at the start of the 2024 school year. 

In some areas, the reversal has already started and districts are pulling down their “help wanted” signs.  and  issued a  this spring. , , and Baltimore County .  and Seattle are already doing . And this is just the beginning. Last month, at an education finance training we conducted at Georgetown University, we heard from dozens of school officials from all over the country whose districts were already making similar moves or are poised to in the next year.

What’s behind the flip? In the last few years, the hiring bonanza has been fueled by a flood of federal pandemic relief funds (ESSER). Districts across the country used that money to add staff that they wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise. Now, that funding is set to disappear by the fall of 2024, which means districts are paying for more employees than they can afford.

​​To make matters worse, during the same time period, districts have been losing students. That means that state and local dollars (which tend to be driven by enrollment counts) are unlikely to make up the gap.

Staffing-enrollment mismatch spells big financial trouble ahead

With all these extra staff in schools and declining enrollment, a rightsizing is coming. These trends aren’t just afflicting large urban districts, either. Rather, in states where we have the data, the patterns are playing out statewide. Over the last decade, districts have grown staffing rolls by 9%, all while student enrollment fell by 8%.

In , staffing is up by 8%, while enrollment is down 7%. Same trend in . Even in , where there’s been enrollment growth of 3%, it won’t be enough to sustain the 20% jump in staffing over the same time period.

True, . So, job seekers might find more opportunities there (though both states offer notoriously low teacher salaries). And just as staffing and enrollment patterns can vary by state, same goes for districts within states, too. Even so, when job openings are down statewide, it means the available candidates are vying for a smaller number of positions. (States or districts wanting to better understand their own staffing and enrollment patterns can use .)

ESSER hangover 

Federal COVID relief funds fed a hiring habit that can’t be sustained.  was once treated as some abstract future threat. But we’re now watching that threat play out in real time as districts work to finalize next year’s budgets this month.  released by schools this spring. 

With last week’s debt limit deal, it’s clear that more federal funding won’t come to districts’ rescue. And states aren’t likely to fill the hole either, as . 

Georgia recently  a one-year drop of 16.5% in net tax collections. Massachusetts had a whopping 31% year-over-year . And 

For educators in high-demand roles, like , there will still be jobs. But for others, it’s likely to get much tougher as districts start to shrink their labor force to align with their new enrollment numbers.

The public discourse about widespread teacher shortages may be confusing to some, particularly when the data show we’ve just finished a period of staffing up our schools. In most regions, however, the new reality is this: Those seeking jobs in schools will soon be facing a job market quite different than what we’ve seen for several years.The upside for districts that are hiring? When there are fewer jobs and more job seekers, districts can afford to be choosier, and the  of new hires rises.

Nearly all districts concerned about a looming fiscal cliff are taking measures to prepare for it, likely to hit when federal pandemic relief aid ends in 2023, according to Rand’s . 

The findings, from a survey of 291 district leaders polled this spring, suggest school officials may not be using relief aid exclusively for salary bumps or full-time teachers because it is not sustainable. 

While districts are hiring staff well beyond pre-pandemic numbers, the positions expanding the most are substitutes, paraprofessionals and tutors — with a quarter surveyed saying they are “avoiding certain staff hires to prevent later layoffs,” the report stated, alluding to full-time teachers.

Many are also using the funds to roll out short-term tutoring and summer programs for students’ academic recovery, or make one-time investments in school infrastructure. 

About a sixth of districts are adding to “rainy day funds” and hiring non-teaching personnel on yearly contracts for “flexibility.”

Researchers also believe the hiring boom is the key factor fueling higher vacancy numbers in the field — not a “big quit” of qualified educators. 

Districts that employed, for example, 100 teachers in 2019, are now seeking 120 new hires to meet students’ increased academic and mental health needs. 

“You could imagine that it might be easier on districts to scale up and scale down their number of substitutes than their number of classroom teachers,” said Melissa Kay Diliberti, an assistant policy researcher at Rand. 

Districts also received a range of funds dependent on their student population — creating a widely varying picture of pandemic-era hiring from district to district, even within state lines.

Large, urban school districts serving mostly students of color are trying to hire more staff, said Diliberti. “These are the schools that probably got the most extra money and that are therefore able to do the most expansion.”

Seven critical findings from Rand’s report: 

1. Nearly 80% of districts have already hired staff beyond pre-pandemic levels

Most of America’s districts are still trying to expand — 94% of large districts, for example, are expanding non-teaching staff, like bus drivers, counselors, paraprofessionals and tutors. And on average 77% of districts have now hired on more teachers and/or substitutes than in 2019. 

Districts’ huge increases in staffing are straining education labor markets, not an exodus from the field, the Rand report states. 

“The stories that have tried to tell this, you know, ‘slew of teachers have been leaving the profession and that’s what’s causing the teacher shortage’ is not quite true,” Diliberti said, adding that there’s still cause for concern about educators’ low morale. “Even if they’re not actually leaving the profession, teachers who are unhappy at work aren’t good for students, right?” 

2. About half of district leaders predict a looming “fiscal cliff”; 87% of those concerned have taken steps to prepare 

More superintendents and district leaders are concerned about an impending fiscal cliff this year than in Spring 2021. And about half of leaders are concerned, across all school types: urban to rural, whether serving majority students or color or majority white students. 

“It’s not necessarily inevitable — districts are aware of the possibility of a fiscal cliff and they can take action like in the coming years to try to prevent it,” Diliberti said. 

Strategic one-time or short term investments, such as investing in school infrastructure, launching summer learning programs or hiring in yearly contracts, “will allow them to more easily reduce the load of staff if and when in the future they don’t have the money to keep them at their current levels,” she added.

3. Substitutes, paraprofessionals, and tutors are the jobs that have expanded the most since the pandemic began

The positions have a direct connection to the pandemic’s strain on schools. Substitutes were districts’ lifeline when faced with numerous full-time teachers in quarantine, while paraprofessionals and tutors “address the unfinished instruction from several years of pandemic-related disruptions to schooling.” 

Bus drivers are also in high demand; about a third of districts have not yet increased their number but are trying. Rand’s report notes a possible reason for the shortage of drivers could be the extensive qualifications and concerns about working in group settings during the pandemic. 

4. Low-poverty districts are more likely than high-poverty districts to have expanded staff above pre-pandemic levels 

Notably, 68% of high-poverty districts have already increased their teaching force beyond pre-pandemic numbers. In comparison, 84% of low-poverty districts have expanded ranks. 

Researchers think the gap could be due in part to a historical trend: higher-poverty schools are harder to staff. Experienced educators are with better working conditions and better pay.

“Teacher labor markets [are] not one thing. Some districts … even before the pandemic started, struggled to hire teachers — in particular, high poverty schools, and sometimes schools in rural areas,” Diliberti explained. “It’s always harder for districts to staff those positions and to staff teachers at the secondary level, especially in math and science.”

5. 17% of districts anticipate ‘large’ teacher shortages next year

While a majority of leaders expect small labor gaps to impact schools next year, large shortages are concerning urban and high poverty leaders the most. 

Suburban and low-poverty district leaders do not anticipate any large shortages. 

On the whole, large principal shortages do not seem to be on leaders’ radar. 

6. Findings suggest a current national substitute shortage 

Over half of districts have expanded substitute teaching staff beyond 2019 levels, and 76% are still trying to expand in anticipation of the fiscal cliff and to meet pandemic-related staffing shortages. 

“In some ways I don’t feel like this substitute teacher shortage is as new or as sexy of a story as a teacher shortage because it’s kind of always been a problem…I think that’s one of the reasons it’s gotten minimized,” Diliberti said. 

Sixty percent of districts increased pay or benefits for substitutes. The average daily rate is 6% higher than in 2019 — now about $122 per day versus $115 per day pre-pandemic. Urban districts have and continue to pay the most: $146 per day in the latest school year, about $30 higher than rural districts. 

7. 90% of districts changed operations because of shortages at some point during the 2021-22 school year 

While some changes were short-term, like asking admin to sub for teachers in quarantine, researchers say the figure is an indicator that even this latest pandemic school year was not at all business as usual. Nearly all American districts had to adapt to major challenges. 

“Operational issues are really just taxing us at every level… As an example, [there were] three different schools on three different days that I had to close because I had too many call-offs and not enough staff to replace them, or substitutes to replace them,” one superintendent told Rand.