NC has billions in unspent federal COVID aid for schools. How can it best help students?
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The post-pandemic lesson plan
Two years after the pandemic disrupted education globally, a new state report shows that some North Carolina students are more than a year behind due to learning losses. State leaders say this can be reversed, but it’s not going to happen overnight. How will N.C. use billions of dollars in unspent federal COVID-19 aid available to address these problems?
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NC students fell behind during the pandemic. How quickly can they regain lost ground?
NC has billions in unspent federal COVID aid for schools. How can it best help students?
See how many months North Carolina students are academically behind in reading and math
NC students need months to catch up from pandemic learning loss. Read the state’s report.
Report: Some NC students are more than a year behind due to pandemic learning loss
North Carolina public schools have billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 aid still available to address problems such as student learning loss.
The question facing state and local school leaders is how to use that aid. At least some of it must be spent to address learning loss, but districts are also weighing how much to spend on hiring social workers and counselors and how much to give in bonuses to keep employees from leaving.
As of April 30, North Carolina school districts and charter schools had only spent $2.4 billion of the $6.2 billion in federal COVID-19 aid awarded to them. They’ve got until September 2024 to spend the last of the funds.
“This is one of the very few social policy challenges we face where the dollars are there to solve it,” Thomas Kane, an education and economics professor at Harvard University, said in an interview. “It’s already been allocated to states and districts. We just need to spend it on the right things to help students catch up.”
Within that large pot is $3.2 billion in federal aid that school districts were issued last year. Of that amount, at least 20%, or $644.8 million, must be spent on addressing learning loss.
Michael Maher, executive director of the N.C. Department of Public Instruction’s Office of Learning Recovery and Acceleration, says it’s a good thing that much of the money hasn’t been spent yet.
“It now gives us a better chance to build out targeted interventions, to think how best to spend that recovery money rather than just putting it out blind,” Maher said during a briefing on a new report showing student learning loss.
Targeted interventions
Last summer, state lawmakers required every school district to offer a six-week, summer school program for students in all grades to address learning loss. It drew a record total of nearly 250,000 of the state’s 1.4 million public school students..
There’s no state requirement for school districts to offer a summer program this year, aside from the one that is annually provided for elementary school students as part of the Read To Achieve program.
Unlike last year, Maher said schools now have a better sense of which students need the assistance.
Maher said his office will hold an all-day meeting this summer of school district and charter school leaders to discuss strategies to address learning loss. He said it won’t be just one strategy, such as high-dosage tutoring, but likely multiple things that will need to be used.
“The idea is for us to help find out what really works and then invest more heavily in those particular interventions,” Maher said.
State-supported programs
The Office of Learning Recovery and Acceleration will use the state’s share of the COVID aid to support several programs over the next few years:
▪ $40 million this summer to offer Summer Bridge Academies to help students such as rising kindergartners, sixth-graders and ninth-graders get a jump start into next school year.
▪ $26 million this summer and $36 million next summer to offer Career Accelerator programs where middle and high school students can partner with local businesses to learn about career skills.
“We are really trying to think about recovery in the broadest sense, so it’s not really just about reading and math but it’s about how do we get students better prepared for life,” Maher said.
▪ $36 million this fall to offer math enrichment programs to address learning loss in math in grades 4-8. A state analysis showed that learning gaps particularly widened in math last school year.
