When her daughter entered Huntington Park High School in Los Angeles this fall, Vega asked if tutoring was available, but was told only students with F’s or a teacher’s referral were eligible.

Vega picked up extra shifts cleaning offices on nights and weekends to pay the $470 a month to get a private tutor. She wonders, however, why that was necessary: The Los Angeles Unified School District is receiving in federal relief funds through the American Rescue Plan — 20 percent of which has to be spent to address learning loss, according to the law. 

“The district is really …concentrating on people getting their vaccines,” Vega said in Spanish through an interpreter. “Let’s let doctors and pediatricians do their job and focus on that. The district needs to focus on learning loss and getting to a good academic level.”

Under the law, tutoring is just one way districts can address learning disruption caused by the pandemic. But with research showing that so-called can provide struggling students the academic boost they need, both parents and policymakers expected to see districts use relief funds on such programs.

Thus far, however, the enthusiasm over tutoring has not translated into widespread adoption. A from Burbio, which tracks schools’ responses to the pandemic, shows that out of 1,037 districts nationally, only about a third are spending federal relief funds on tutoring. The Center on Reinventing Public Education’s ongoing review shows that while 62 out of 100 large districts offer tutoring, most don’t provide details on their programs and how many students they serve. 

Some districts have addressed learning loss by lengthening the school day or providing small group instruction. Others that have launched tutoring programs either restrict services to specific students or limit the number of sessions available. A shortage of available tutors has only exacerbated the problem.

“There is good research that high-dosage tutoring has really transformative potential and it’s also true that school systems are struggling mightily to meet the demand,” said Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change.

In October, another Los Angeles Unified parent, Ada Mendoza, was offered tutoring for her two youngest children twice-a-week at Manchester Avenue Elementary School. One hitch: It only lasted a month.

She signed them up, but had doubts that a month would be enough to make up for a year of distance learning. Eight-year-old Juan Jose was beginning to read when schools shifted to remote instruction, but now struggles with words of three or more syllables, reading comprehension and writing complete sentences.

Her children got the flu in October and missed some sessions. She said Juan Jose’s teacher told her he is still reading far below grade-level. “They lost a lot of learning, and they need a lot of help,” she said in Spanish through an interpreter.

According to the district, tutoring is available for children with disabilities, long-term English learners in grades three through eight, and foster, homeless and low-income students “based on performance indicators as identified by school sites.”

Mendoza said she can’t afford a private tutor, but some parents have gone that route. October from the U.S. Census Bureau showed that 3 in 10 families with at least one school-age child had spent their first three monthly child tax credit payments on school-related expenses, including tutoring and afterschool programs.

“Guess we’re not all spending it on getting our nails done and filet mignon,” quipped Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, an advocacy organization. The group’s recent polling showed that more than a third of parents consider not having enough tutoring or to be a major or moderate problem.

The union has launched — or EPIC — a “watchdog campaign” to follow the $122 billion K-12 schools are receiving through the relief bill. And in Los Angeles, Vega has joined other Los Angeles parents taking part in the nonprofit , which monitors how the district is using relief money to help students get back on grade level.  

Parent Revolution, another Los Angeles advocacy group, wants the district to create an “ for every student. Even if students can get free tutoring, it’s often a “blanket approach” that might not target their needs, said Jay Artis-Wright, executive director of the organization. 

“We work with populations of families who have academic challenges that preceded COVID and now have a wider gap,” she said. “There is a surplus of funds that can support them, but only if we can agree that each child’s academic recovery is unique and should be treated as such.”

‘This giant puzzle’

Districts that have launched tutoring programs say they can’t serve everyone — especially as a tight labor market and quarantine requirements continue to fuel personnel shortages.

The Metro Nashville Public Schools, for example, has been able to sign up 500 tutors — a mix of teachers, paraprofessionals and community volunteers, said Keri Randolph, the district’s chief strategy officer. But that’s half the number they had planned to recruit, which means less than 1,000 students are receiving tutoring instead of the 2,000 the district expected to enroll through its $19 million Accelerating Scholars program.

The Delta variant, Randolph said, affected the size of the volunteer pool and she wasn’t as successful hiring retired teachers as she’d hoped. 

The program — 30-minute sessions, three times a week for 10 weeks — currently targets low-performing first- through third-graders in literacy and eighth- and ninth-graders in math. 

“It’s this giant puzzle,” Randolph said, adding that tutoring is “hot right now, but people have no idea how hard it is.” 

Staff members at the 46 schools now offering tutoring manage the schedule so teachers aren’t “overburdened,” she said. The district tries to schedule the tutoring sessions during the regular school day to avoid the need for extra transportation.

But there are exceptions. Kindall Maupin, who has a daughter in eighth grade at DuPont Hadley Middle School in the district, was only offered a 7:30 a.m. slot for math tutoring — a time that doesn’t work because her daughter has ADHD and can’t focus that early in the morning.

“I feel like if they can have football practice and cheerleading practice at the end of the day, why can’t we do this then,” Maupin said. She added that she’s even considered refinancing her house to afford private tutoring. “I have been there, literally sitting down to crunch the numbers to see how I could do this.”

Maybe next semester

Experts said the current pressures on local districts affect whether they can pull off a new program on a large scale. 

“Many educators are understandably exhausted from these past 18 months of school disruptions,” said Susanna Loeb, director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. “Implementing a new program — no matter how much funding is available for it or how much research supports its effectiveness — takes effort.”

Jonathan Travers, a partner with Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit that helps districts address budgeting and staffing challenges, said many districts have contracted with vendors to give students 24-hour access to online homework help.

“We are trying to be clear that that is not the same thing” as high-dosage tutoring, he said, but added that with districts focusing on filling vacancies and managing quarantines, some are only now shifting to “actually putting canoes out in the pond around accelerating learning.” 

That doesn’t stop districts from adding tutoring programs next semester, he said. And he added that some who are frustrated with the pace of implementation may push for districts to reimburse parents spending their own money on tutoring.

Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, alluded to Travers’s idea in an this week, suggesting that districts share some of those federal funds with parents who are spending their own time and money helping students catch up. 

“Given all the labor shortages, and the willingness to pay parents for , it is interesting that districts haven’t done more to go the route of paying parents to tutor their kids,” she said in an interview. “We thought we’d see some by now.”

Randolph, in Nashville, said she thinks her district needs to do a better job of communicating the other ways the district is to address learning loss, such as funding $18 million for summer school and $6 million for computer-based literacy and math programs.

“It’s not just tutoring or nothing,” she said.

Still, she said leaders plan to continue tutoring beyond this period of recovery. That’s one reason why the district decided to build the program in-house, instead of contracting with a private provider, which can cost per student for a year. That’s not a sustainable solution, Randolph said. The district is spending $400 per student for the 10-week period.

“We don’t think tutoring is just for a COVID response,” she said. “If it’s the right thing to do now, it’s the right thing to do later.”

The department’s Office for Civil Rights on Monday sent letters to five states — , , , and — explaining that their policies prevent districts from protecting students that might be at higher risk of health complications from COVID-19 because of a disability.

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“It’s simply unacceptable that state leaders are putting politics over the health and education of the students they took an oath to serve,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement. “The Department will fight to protect every student’s right to access in-person learning safely and the rights of local educators to put in place policies that allow all students to return to the classroom full-time in-person safely this fall.”

The OCR letters, sent to the superintendents in each state, are the latest development in an ongoing, three-way standoff between the Biden administration, Republican governors and districts trying to respond to rising numbers of students testing positive for COVID-19 because of the Delta variant. Districts, especially in Florida and Texas, have moved ahead with mandates regardless of governors’ threats to withhold funding.

“Local leaders are not being given the freedom that they want and need right now as those closest to the ground,” said Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change, adding that universal masking, “buys us time to finish the job on vaccination. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so critical right now.”

The organization includes superintendents such as Chad Gestson of the Phoenix Union High School District in Arizona and Pedro Martinez of the San Antonio Independent School District who have defied state laws banning the mandates.

Oklahoma Superintendent Joy Hofmeister anticipated the OCR’s action, saying in a statement that officials were not surprised by this civil rights investigation spurred by passage of a state law prohibiting mask requirements in Oklahoma public schools.Her department, she said, will “fully cooperate.”

The U.S. Department of Education said OCR did not send letters to Texas, Florida, Arkansas and Arizona. Governors in those states have also banned local mandates, but the courts have intervened, temporarily suspending the bans on universal masking.

In Florida last week, a Leon County county for a group of Florida parents that sued over Gov. Ron DeSantis’s ban on local district mask mandates. And in Texas, has ruled that Gov. Greg Abbott overstepped his authority and that some districts should be allowed to require masks. But the state’s attorney general quickly appealed, leaving districts in further limbo.

On Tuesday, the South Carolina Supreme Court is scheduled to hear filed over the state’s ban, and Superintendent Molly Spearman has urged the legislature to reconsider it. On Aug. 18, she sent districts stating that mandates might be necessary for those teaching or coming in contact with medically fragile or immunocompromised students.

“The [department] is particularly sensitive to the law’s effect on South Carolina’s most vulnerable students and are acutely aware of the difficult decisions many families are facing concerning a return to in-person instruction,” according to a statement.

Cardona has said publicly that he’s concerned some parents might not send their children to school if masks aren’t required, and President Joe Biden on Aug. 18 authorized the secretary to use the “enforcement authority” of OCR.

The fact-finding process will focus on what is known as Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which protects students from discrimination because of their disability and guarantees them the right to a free and appropriate public education. The agency will also look at whether the states are violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires public buildings, including schools, to accommodate those with disabilities.

Educators welcome President Joe Biden’s plan to spend $20 billion — on top of the federal government’s current funding for high-poverty districts — to address the needs of schools with the greatest concentrations of disadvantaged students.

But with the new administration already getting a late start on the budget process and Republicans cringing at the size of Biden’s infrastructure and family policy proposals, it’s unclear where the additional funding will come from.

The president’s for fiscal year 2022 would reverse “years of underinvestment in federal education programs,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told reporters last week. But some Republicans are calling it , considering the other relief bills Congress has passed to address the pandemic.

The current federal budget runs through the end of September. If Congress doesn’t agree on a new budget by then, lawmakers would likely pass a continuing resolution to keep funding the government, leaving open the possibility they won’t act on Biden’s new proposals this year. Meanwhile, the administration continues to in an effort to find a compromise over Biden’s infrastructure plan, but it’s possible Democrats would plow ahead and pass much of the president’s agenda on their own.

“Democrats hold control and they want to help the president fulfill his priorities,” said Danny Carlson, associate executive director for policy and advocacy at the National Association of Elementary School Principals. “He obviously campaigned on tripling Title I.”

As they did with the March relief bill, Democrats could use the reconciliation process, which allows them to pass spending bills without a single Republican vote. With the Senate split 50-50, Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia, could once again end up casting the deciding vote. If the administration aims for a bipartisan deal, Biden will need the support of at least 10 Republicans.

, released May 28, would keep funding for the existing Title I program at the current level of $16.5 billion but would create a new formula for distributing $20 billion in “equity grants” to states that work to close gaps between rich and poor districts and between those serving primarily white students and those that enroll more students of color.

, an advocacy organization that ceased operating last year, showed that despite decades of school finance lawsuits, there was still a $23 billion gap between white and nonwhite school districts as of 2016.

Under the administration’s plan districts would need to spend the additional funds on priorities Biden promoted during his campaign — increasing teacher compensation, expanding students’ access to advanced courses and providing preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds.

But many questions about the proposal remain, particularly how the federal government would hold states and districts accountable for the money, said Khalilah Harris, managing director of K-12 education policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. Some of those answers would come if the plan is approved when the Department of Education creates rules for the program, according to the proposal.

“It will be important not to just have surface-level conversations about equity and access,” Harris said, adding that she expects Republicans to keep a close eye on how districts spend any increase in funding and that education is likely to be a “huge issue” in next year’s midterm elections.

She said the Title I equity proposal complements Biden’s plan to increase funding for community schools to $443 million — almost 15 times the current level — and would help students with the greatest needs, including homeless students, children in foster care and those with disabilities.

The additional dollars, however, wouldn’t change the fact that most funding for schools still comes from the state and local level. Zahava Stadler, a special assistant for state funding and policy at The Education Trust, an advocacy organization, said the new equity grants can serve as a “powerful incentive” for states to address long-standing funding disparities.

‘Think about sustainability’

Another challenge is that the appropriations bill covers not just education, but also the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services. Republican members of the House appropriations committee expressed shock that Biden is asking for almost $103 billion for the education department — a 41 percent increase.

“Apparently math was not his strong suit when it came to his education because this budget he has put forward is so far out of whack,” Congressman Ben Cline (R-Va.) said last month during an appropriations hearing. “This level of an increase in spending in the same year that Congress has allocated extensive funds to mitigate the effects of COVID is highly irresponsible.”

If the new program becomes a reality, district leaders say it could allow them to continue the programs they’re launching with relief funds to address students’ learning and social-emotional needs brought on by the pandemic.

“One of the challenges of hiring staff is you have to be able to think about sustainability,” said Robert Tagorda, the executive director of equity, access, and college and career readiness in the Long Beach Unified School District, the fourth largest in California. “That makes it hard for us to think about long-term investments.”

And John Sasaki, spokesman for the Oakland Unified School District, said even though the funds would come with restrictions, “they are intended to help low-income students overcome obstacles that their peers do not face.”

Michael Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change, said district leaders have talked about using federal relief funds either for one-time expenses, such as facility improvements, or innovative programs that they “hope attract state and local dollars over time.” With the equity grants, they could do both, he said.

The budget also includes a new $100 million competitive grant program for middle and high school career-and-technical education programs, separate from the Title I proposal. Biden, however, isn’t asking for any funding increases for the national Charter Schools Program — a mistake, Magee said, since charter schools have been reporting enrollment growth in many states since the beginning of the pandemic.

And Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said charter schools should have been included in the president’s equity agenda, considering they predominantly serve children of color. The alliance is pushing for an increase in funding to $500 million in next year’s budget.

In a statement, Rees said, “The administration’s pledge to lift all forms of excellence in education cannot be fully achieved without explicit support for all public schools — both charter and district.”