Countless LEAs issued pink slips in March to staff that had been hired when relief dollars were incoming. Additional staff to advance initiatives like learning recovery and addressing mental health needs was a major point of investment for later ESSER dollars.

Facing a $28 billion budget shortfall attributed to ebbing enrollment and attendance, a cost-of-living increase that was less than anticipated from the state and the discontinuation of COVID relief, Poway Unified School District committed to avoiding layoffs in 2024–25.

Guided by a multi-year plan, the district used the bulk of its ESSER funds to support students’ social-emotional health. Social workers, counselors, student support specialists and psychologists were brought on and universal mental health screenings for middle and high schoolers were implemented, according to Poway USD Board President Michelle O’Connor-Ratcliff. Class sizes were also reduced for certain grade levels.

The expiration of these funds has led the district to cut about $15 million from its budget, considering measures including reducing bus routes for general education students, freezing some vacant positions, eliminating others and pulling from reserves in order to keep supporting student well-being. Community input was solicited throughout the budget planning process.

“Unfortunately, while ESSER funds are being discontinued, the need for these services still exists and is still urgent. Accordingly, the board and our community’s priority has been to maintain the increased level of mental health services for our students — even in the face of severe budget cuts,” O’Connor-Ratcliff said. “Moving this expenditure to our general fund has required some difficult decisions, but this is a commitment to student wellness that we intend to honor.”

Receiving just under $360 million in ESSER dollars, including $230 million from ESSER III, San Bernardino City USD had used the first two rounds of funding prior to their respective deadlines and planned to have the third exhausted by Sept. 30, said Terry Comnick, the district’s associate superintendent of Business, Facilities and Operations.

As the clock winds down on the federal aid, which helped many LEAs avoid a looming fiscal cliff and stabilize their budgets, Comnick explained the financial and programmatic benefits of the relief funds.

“It helped us not fall off a cliff,” Comnick said. “It did help us ramp it down in a methodical, strategic, meaningful way, which goes back to us leveraging those dollars that are continuing, but also those one-time dollars that the state has now infused us with for learning recovery, for example. That’s going to allow us to continue some of these cost items and ramp it downwards and not have that cliff, but also be mindful of maintaining and sustaining those cost items that we have found to be most effective and letting go of those that haven’t been.”

Similar to most of their counterparts around the state, district leaders spent early allotments on virus-mitigation measures and technology, then switched gears to focus on student well-being and learning recovery through methods like increased summer programming and providing “guest teachers” — substitutes who support small groups of students who are struggling in a subject while the primary teacher works with the rest of the class. The subs, who are part of the campus community and present every school day, help to build students’ subject matter competence and then transition them back to normal instruction, according to Comnick.

The district has had so much success with the guest teacher model for its K-12 learners, that it is an area they are looking to continue funding. “I think for the cost, it can be very attractive for intervention and closing gaps,” he noted.

Utilizing data will be key to decision making when it comes to determining future budget priorities. The recently adopted Vision 2030 strategic plan will ensure that the district hears the needs of the community as well.

“It’s all about needs assessment, what’s our need?” Comnick said. “Not what we think we want, but what do we need? And so, we’re letting that be our driver.”

Comnick explained that districts can leverage other funding streams available in California like the Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grant that runs through 2027–28; Arts, Music & Instructional Materials Block Grant; Expanded Learning Opportunities Program; Literacy Coaches and Reading Specialists Grant; ongoing supplemental concentration funds; and Titles I, II, III and IV.

While grateful for the ESSER funds, and acknowledging the importance of accountability, Comnick was excited to be rid of the related federal reporting requirements. He wished that the reporting requirements could have promoted transparency and also been more meaningful at the local level and suggested that soliciting input from the field could have been beneficial.

Comnick added that the country may look back at the ESSER process and contemplate what could have been done differently, “and it might be not having an arbitrary sunset date.” He said that a more intentional, methodical approach may have been better.

“This kind of artificial deadline is a little strange,” CSBA Principal Research Manager Jeremy Anderson said. “This money was put there to help students, and we have a lot of evidence that it provided tremendous support … And to see it just stop is concerning.”

Kelsey Krausen, WestEd’s director of Strategic Resource Allocation and Systems Planning, added that that evidence is mostly anecdotal as “the types of data that were collected do not allow for any kind of causal-impact analysis.”

“Infrequently, systems collected data on which students or student groups had access to a particular program or intervention,” Krausen said. “So, actually measuring those specific impacts has been a major challenge. I think in the years to come, that’s going to be really important jigsaw work for researchers to put together the data available to really understand where they can tease out some of that impact.”

Local, formative data on students served, types of programming, outcomes and staffing can inform LEAs on an initiative’s impact, Krausen said.

Both CSBA and WestEd have provided their respective guidance and resources to LEAs in the past several years. Anderson, who has been tracking the quarterly ESSER expenditure reports, shared that in the December briefing (the most recent available at the time of this writing), about 63 percent of ESSER III funds had been spent statewide.

“That sounds very good, but the actual raw amount is a bit alarming,” he said. “It was about $4.7 billion still in the system at that time and that’s quite a bit of money to move in the time left. I know there’s been a lot of discussions about concerns around getting that money out the door versus having to forfeit it.”

Among LEAs that have lagged in deploying ESSER funds, Krausen said primary reasons include not having ample staff and supply chain issues. Deferring expenditures to the home stretch can have its risks, Krausen warned.

“That sets those systems up for a greater cliff when the ESSER funds are no longer available,” Krausen said. “We want to be paying attention to those districts who have lots of money left to spend, both because there’s the danger of unused funds that are really important for supporting students, but also because of this potential to set them up for a fiscal cliff.”

LEAs can request an extension with the California Department of Education (CDE), which will then interface with the federal Education Department on the matter. In April, an Education Department spokesperson told Education Week that no liquidation extension requests made by states on behalf of LEAs for ESSER I and II had been rejected.

CDE anticipated sending LEAs an application for ESSER III extensions by mid-summer but cautioned that the Education Department intended the process to be for exceptional circumstances and that not all applications may be approved. CDE encouraged LEAs to ensure projects comply with federal guidelines and use their funds by the January deadline.

As it did with ESSER II, California is expected to pursue a statewide liquidation extension for ESSER III, according to Erika Hoffman, CSBA Deputy Legislative Director of State and Federal Programs. If the state applies and is approved for an extension, it isn’t a blanket waiver for LEAs, and they will still need to apply individually through CDE.

In preparation for financial changes LEAs will face in the coming years, Krausen said creating long-term plans and working closely with labor and community partners will be key strategies in establishing a stable budget, as will looking for chances to leverage state programs like the LEA Medi-Cal Billing Option Program. Using data to drive decision making, which LEAs like San Bernardino City USD are already doing, will be important too.

“I think board members can be proactive in requesting those data from district leadership and asking questions about the basis for decisions about which programs and services to prioritize or maintain when ESSER funds go away,” Krausen said, noting that disaggregating data by school, student group, grade and other elements is even better.

Communicating with members of the public on successes that came from local ESSER investments, letting them provide input on spending choices as in Poway USD, and explaining any shifts in offerings are all efforts that can help build and maintain trust, added CSBA’s Anderson.

“If you just see all of these layoffs or you see these programmatic cuts that you might really rely on, you might become frustrated with your board or your district. So that’s why districts need to have clear communication through a variety of channels that say, ‘Hey, here’s why this is happening,’” Anderson said.

CSBA has created resources including a customizable PowerPoint template to aid LEA leaders in this. Access the presentation and related content at csba.pub/BudgetResources.

Even the experts are waiting to see the significance of this historic era, although they know the LEAs that will be hit hardest when the last ESSER funds are expended.

“What an extraordinary time in education funding. It’s almost like we fully funded education for a couple of years and then stopped. So, it’ll be really interesting to see what impact this money has had and for what students,” Anderson said. “The districts that will be most affected are going to be those ones that already had a lot of struggles before the pandemic because of the way that this money was apportioned using Title I to really benefit the most districts in lower socioeconomic communities. And so, at the end of this, they are going to be the ones most impacted by its loss.”

As always, CSBA is pursuing the highest education funding level possible.

“It’s a tough time for schools in that yes, they’re losing the [ESSER] funding, but hopefully they don’t lose the lesson that I think schools learned of looking beyond current constraints and into how we might do things differently,” CSBA’s Hoffman said. “Having a lot of money to do things differently did help, but hopefully changes that schools made in their educational programs and how they approach education are things that they will continue on with as we look to move education forward into the 21st century and beyond for student success and student achievement.

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Heather Kemp is a staff writer for California Schools.