EDITORIAL
Schools received billions in federal aid. Why are we in the dark about its spending?
$190 billion has gone to local school districts, but there is no clear accounting of how it’s being spent.
Teachers often insist that students show their work. Well, after pumping an extra $190 billion into 13,000 school districts over the last two years to help them cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government ought to make the same demand of districts: How did they spend all that money, and are the students in their schools better off for it?
It’s an unprecedented amount of cash, and it came with few strings attached — a “grand experiment” in public education, as one school finance expert put it. Schools faced a huge, sudden list of new needs, from installing ventilation systems to addressing educational setbacks for the many students who struggled with remote learning...
2 comments:
No accountability for spending the taxpayer's money is the very thing at which public institututions excel.
The first ESSER money to public schools in USA -- Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER Fund) -- from May 2020, ESSER II Dec. 2020.
ESSER III that Biden signed in March 2021 with American Recovery Act -- ESSER III cash = $121.97 billion.
The first two should already have been spent and no later than this year.
ESSER III --- Massachusetts' share = $1.83 billion --- must be spent within two or three years.
https://oese.ed.gov/files/2021/03/FINAL_ARP-ESSER-Methodology-and-Table.pdf
The Boston Globe headline, from this Nov. 18, 2021 Editorial makes no sense to me: "Schools received billions in federal aid. Why are we in the dark about its spending?"
My response is: Why is the Globe as much in the dark about this as they are about their COVID-19 reportage?
Each school district in the Globe's state, Massachusetts, got a chunk.
Some of us that actually cover local news, and still do actual news, have reported on this extensively.
Public schools here are directly run by a Superintendent of Schools appointed by school committees.
Since this $$ are grants -- instead of an appropriation -- no budget hearings are required to be convened by school boards.
For me, this is the biggest question with this, given the amount of money.
Were it an appropriation, municipalities with town meeting forms of government would have the right to approve what would be appropriated and where. Otherwise it's city councils.
Since it's a grant, the school districts must meet the grant criteria.
Covid related expenses, obviously, meet this criteria.
However, these one-time lump sums, in terms of local school budgets, means exactly that: a shot in the arm. And these sums, roughly, represent appx. 10% in total of a school operating budget for one year.
Some districts hired extra "therapists" and the like this year, owing to what they say are myriad "mental health" problems and the like resulting from nearly a year with children banned from coming to campus.
The money is more than anything else, to keep children, from now on: in classrooms, as remote "learning" was as a big a failure as: the covid death shots in particular, and local and state and federal government response to this plandemic, in general.
My own read on: "Is this why the schools are so hot for COVID vaccine mandates?" --- is that, at least what I've observed in Mass. . . . Is that there are folks on local boards of health, in particular those with an MD beside their name--that don't know sh*t from Cheyenne about public health, especially in terms of Sars CoV-2 --- and yet imagine themselves experts!
With disastrous consequences.
Local BOH's in Mass. advise the school boards and superintendents. . . and most public health directors are not at all up to speed on the actual science of the virus, much less able to conceptualize, rationally, what is in best interests of children.
Just about all of the above, almost all of them, cite by rote: CDC said this, CDC recommends that, etc. ad nausea.
Too many MDs and epis and public health "experts", at local level, too --- that are, in the words of Dr. Malone: Just Winging It!
Dr. Nass, we need you in charge of CDC, or as Commissioner of Mass. DPH!
But alas. . . . and so the nonsense and perfidy and ignroance and great harm to kids, continues. And children being shot up, and the BOHs and School Boards and Supts cheer loudly! This is the Massachusetts Reality.
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