At 5:03pm Friday evening, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon officially called “time” on the COVID recovery effort. Whatever federal funds that hadn’t been spent yet would now go back to the Treasury. If your school district still had outstanding contracts or receipts, well, too bad!
According to reporting from The 74’s Linda Jacobson, this amounted to about $3 billion nationally. As of the end of February, the Department of Education had granted extensions to 41 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The biggest losers from the Department’s sudden reversal will be Puerto Rico, with $332 million outstanding; Texas, which had $232 million left to spend; and Pennsylvania, which had $221 million remaining.
Maryland comes next on the list. State school superintendent Carey Wright called the decision “catastrophic” and noted, “the money is being used for tutoring, reading materials, after-school programming, even some construction projects such as repairs for heating and air conditioning units, among others.”
According to the Baltimore Banner Wright, “is now telling local school systems to stop spending on any ongoing programs until the state can provide more clarification about the situation.” Maryland school board president Josh Michael noted that, “a tutor who is currently helping students catch up academically may not be in a classroom next week.”
You might argue that schools should have planned better and spent the money faster. After all, not every state asked for a spending extension. That’s a reasonable point… except that these extensions were telegraphed years in advance and were standard practice for earlier pots of money. Some smart policy advocates actually recommended schools take advantage of the additional time in order to continue delivering services like tutoring or execute on more complicated construction projects.
To put it mildly, this is a dumb, short-sighted decision from the Trump Administration. It will abruptly cut off important services for kids and throw state and district budgets into unnecessary turmoil.
