After the pandemic close down schools across the country, the federal government provided almost $190 billion in aid to aid them reopen and respond to the effects of the pandemic. In the year and a half since millions of children were sent dwelling house, the Pedagogy Department has done but limited tracking of how the money has been spent. That has left officials in Washington largely in the dark about how constructive the help has been in helping students, peculiarly those whose schools and communities were among the hardest hit by the pandemic.

"We've been in the pandemic at present for nearly a twelvemonth and a half," said Anne Hyslop, the director of policy development at the education advocacy grouping Alliance for First-class Education. "There is a responsibility to the public to brand sure the funds are spent responsibly, but besides make sure that the funding that is spent is accountable to supporting students and educators."

Provisional annual reports submitted to the federal government by country education agencies underscored the dearth of clear, detailed data. Agencies classified how the funds were spent using six very broad categories, including technology and sanitization. Co-ordinate to a ProPublica analysis of more than 16,000 of the reports covering March 2020 to September 2020, but over half of the $3 billion in aid was categorized as "other," providing no insight into how the funds were allocated.

In the absence of a centralized and detailed federal tracking system, the monitoring of relief funds flowing to the nation's more than 13,000 school districts has largely been left to states. Some districts have been institute to be spending their federal funds on projects seemingly at odds with the spirit of the help program, such as track and field facilities and bleachers.

While such spending is not prohibited by the federal authorities, the stated goals of the relief program were to open up schools safely to maximize in-person learning and, more broadly, to address the touch on of the pandemic.

The Biden administration wants to collect more data. But its efforts have come up more than than a year after the previous assistants began disbursing the relief funds, and some school districts have bristled at the belated push for more than detailed data collection.

Hyslop said that while this may identify an added burden on districts, the data is essential. "We demand this data to make sure the needs are met, to make sure high-needs schools are not existence shortchanged. … We have to make certain this is really supporting students."

The bulk of the school aid was allocated from March 2020 to March 2021 and funneled through state didactics departments into K-12 school districts, which have until 2024 to budget the terminal of the funds.

Under the terms laid out by the federal authorities, states are responsible for developing tracking systems to ensure districts are spending the money on countering the furnishings of the pandemic.

The federal regime has long given states considerable latitude in setting standards and curriculum. Christine Pitts, a fellow at the Center on Reinventing Public Pedagogy, said responsibility for tracking COVID-19 relief funds has similarly been delegated to the states, creating a patchwork of oversight practices. "In that location's 50 states, and often in instruction that means there'due south fifty different ways of doing the business," said Pitts.

The federal regime has started to request limited data from states on how districts have spent their funds. The section too requires spending plans from states, and those plans must be approved before the last circular of funds is released.

These limited reporting requirements reverberate the early, urgent days of the pandemic, when officials wanted to go money to schoolhouse districts equally chop-chop as possible.

In June 2020, as the first federal relief dollars were beginning to flow to districts, the function of inspector full general of the Educational activity Department warned in a report that the department must improve its oversight, monitoring and data drove to reduce potential fraud and waste. The OIG noted that after the 2007-2008 fiscal crisis, the Education Department was responsible for allocating $98 billion through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which led to numerous investigations into abuse and waste.

When the OIG raised concerns last yr to then-Deputy Educational activity Secretary Mick Zais, Zais said the pandemic aid legislation itself had created "enormous pressure level" to distribute funds quickly, according to an OIG study.

A spokesperson for the OIG, Catherine Grant, said that while distributing pandemic aid presented its own challenges, oversight and monitoring were "longstanding" bug for the department.

Luke Jackson, a spokesperson for the Instruction Department, said in an emailed argument that the department was working with states and districts to collect preliminary data to "to ensure federal funds are beingness spent to best serve the needs of students, educators, and school communities."

The law places few restrictions on how districts can spend the federal aid, as long as the investments are loosely connected to the effects of the pandemic. This broad latitude has enabled districts to fund projects that some education experts have deemed questionable.

In Iowa, the Creston Community School Commune allocated almost $231,000 of its pandemic relief funds to upgrade its outdoor stadium, including an expansion of its bleachers. According to district documents, the structure is intended to provide increased space for social distancing and to brand the bleachers wheelchair accessible.

Creston's superintendent, Deron Stender, did not respond to ProPublica'southward requests for comment.

Last calendar month in Pulaski County, Kentucky, the schoolhouse board approved the reconstruction of its track and field facilities, allocating about $i million in federal pandemic funding for the runway replacement.

"Nosotros want to have facilities that are bully for our students," the district superintendent, Patrick Richardson, told a local paper after the project was approved. Richardson did non respond to ProPublica's requests for comment.

"In that location is certainly a lot of flexibility on how the money tin be used," said Hyslop of the Alliance for Excellent Educational activity, simply said athletic investments are "not in the spirit of the law."

The statement from Jackson, the Education Section spokesman, did non address a question from ProPublica about using relief funds for athletic projects.

In other cases, the spending priorities of school districts accept drawn complaints from some parents. In Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools spent more than $45 million of its early pandemic funding on ventilation systems and personal protective equipment. But some parents said that more federal aid should have been directed to services for students with special needs, who correspond nearly fourteen.4% of the 178,000 students enrolled in the commune.

Debra Tisler, a former special education instructor, said that her 15-year-erstwhile son, who has dyslexia, saw the 20 hours a month of specialized teaching that he received before the pandemic cutting in half over the course of more a year of virtual learning.

In January 2021, the federal education department opened upwardly an investigation into Fairfax schools because of "disturbing reports involving the district'south provision of educational services to children with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic." Asked on Tuesday nearly the condition of the Fairfax investigation, the Educational activity Section'south press office did not take that information readily available.

"They have the ability to do it and they are choosing not to. It's heartbreaking," said Tisler, who has had a contentious relationship with the district. In Baronial, her son went back to school in person.

In the first two waves of pandemic aid from the county, state and federal governments, Fairfax schools received at to the lowest degree $157.5 million, of which it spent $9.6 million on direct services for students with disabilities to help them catch upward, co-ordinate to budget documents. Helen Lloyd, a spokesperson for Fairfax County Public Schools, said that much of the initial coronavirus relief funds paid for "systemwide technology, school safety mitigation measures and equipment and PPE costs." She said it is non possible to calculate the proportion of the funding that paid just for services for students with disabilities.

Lloyd did non specifically address Tisler's concerns, citing privacy protections, only the spokesperson said that the district's spending plan was based on extensive customs input and that learning loss was found to be a priority. She added that from the 3rd wave of pandemic aid, which passed this yr, the district has allocated $46.2 meg, which is being used to extend the contracts of special educational activity teachers past 30 minutes a day, and $500,000 to counter learning loss of students with disabilities.

In Texas, the McAllen Independent School Commune decided to spend $4 meg of its education pandemic relief funds to construct a 5-acre outdoor learning surroundings continued to a local nature and birding center owned by the city. Tory Guerra, whose children attend McAllen'southward schools, expressed concerns that the project, which will non exist completed until December 2024, is not prioritizing the urgent learning needs of children who have been directly impacted by the pandemic.

"​​There are so many other programs that nosotros could invest in that we could apply immediately and come across benefits immediately rather than years downwardly the road," Guerra said. She believes that the federal assist should directly accost the pressing emotional and bookish wellbeing of students, many of whom have struggled to proceed up in the classroom. "One-half the kids won't even go to reap the benefit because the nature eye isn't even built."

Marker May, a spokesperson for the McAllen independent district, said the cost of the project is a modest fraction of the district's $139.5 million in assist. He said the outdoor space volition provide students with resources and experiences that will bolster children'due south scientific knowledge.

Some states and districts have adult their own public reporting platforms. In Georgia, the education department built a dashboard that shows how much money each district has received and the programs they take spent it on. Just other states have not offered as much visibility into districts' spending. Indiana, for instance, has and then far made little information public, but it is currently developing an online portal.

In the provisional federal reports that categorize how aid money is spent, some of the largest districts in the nation marked all of their aid equally going to the "other" category, including Los Angeles Unified, which spent $49.5 million, and New York City's schools, which spent $111.five million.

Instead of spending the aid on summertime school or engineering science, New York City's district, the largest in the country, used its federal funds to plug a gap in its budget, which had been cut by the land. Katie O'Hanlon, a spokesperson for the district, told ProPublica that the district used the funds to cover the wages and operations of custodial workers. O'Hanlon said the district had followed country reporting requirements. J.P. O'Hare, a spokesperson for the New York State Instruction Department, said the state is using the "other" category until the federal government provides more direction on reporting requirements.

Shannon Haber, a spokesperson for Los Angeles Unified, said the district's reporting was submitted based on the state's requirements. Many districts categorized their spending equally "other" initially, but as the school twelvemonth progressed, the spending categories diversified, said Scott Roark, a spokesperson for the California Department of Education.

Even if the information is publicly available on a local level, the lack of standardization from land to land makes information technology impossible to get a national film of how the funds are being directed.

Some experts said it may be too soon to get a larger view of how the aid was spent. "There'south going to be a natural lag betwixt a district receiving the money, spending the coin and reporting upwards to the land," said Paige Kowalski, executive vice president for the teaching advocacy grouping Data Quality Campaign.

But other experts say that without real-fourth dimension insight into district spending, schools will not be able to shift priorities if they observe certain programs are working better than others.

"There can be an opportunity to practise mid-course corrections, if nosotros find something working well or not well," said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Heart for Education Data & Research at the University of Washington. "We volition be in a bad place if we don't have much show that $200 billion didn't move the needle."

This by July, the federal Education Section announced plans to increment its data drove from districts in 2022, just dozens of districts and country pedagogy agencies said that more than oversight could leave them overburdened.

"It will take some other block of time," said Brenda Turner, the business director of Haskell Consolidated Independent School District in central Texas, adding that her district already filed detailed plans to the state'south education department explaining how Haskell planned to spend its aid. "They need to effigy out how to pull it out of their own system to report to the federal regime instead of putting it on us."

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Jeff Kao contributed research.