"But schools are sitting on all this money!"

 I'll be writing something more complex up for this for work, but I wanted to get a couple of links out to those slogging it out on this right away.

I've now heard from multiple sources that the word on the street, or, more worryingly, around the State House is that schools are still sitting on "all that federal funding" and most of it hasn't been spent yet.

This deserves--and will get, if not necessarily here!--more of a complete response than I am able to give right now, but let's first note where this is coming from. U.S. Ed has posted this Education Stimulus Fund Transparency Portal which is intended to track spending of the COVID relief funding for schools. 

The main issue is this: there's a long way between a School Committee allocating the funding, and the federal government recognizing it as spent. As Jess Gartner has noted: 

In this context, “spent” can mean several things:

- Planned/budgeted
- Encumbered
- Contracted
- PO issued
- Submitted for reimbursement
- Check cut
- Reported

These “analyses” are largely looking at only the “reported” definition, ignoring $ in other states of process. https://t.co/1ALQqbwiFt

— Jess Gartner (@jessgartner) February 2, 2022

This was also governed in Matt Barnum's piece in Chalkbeat:

 ...the federal figures reflect a long data lag. When a district pays a bill with federal money, it takes time for that to be reported to state agencies and then up to the federal government. And the data hasn’t been updated at all since September 2021.

In Indiana, for instance, the state now reports that 20% of the money has been used.

That still might not seem like a lot, but there is another wrinkle: when a school hires a new reading interventionist or starts a project to improve ventilation — both things Wayne Township has done — the money isn’t spent all at once. A new staff member is paid an annual salary over the course of months; an HVAC upgrade takes time to contract, design, and implement.

“By the time you get to the national level, you’ve got a lot of lag plus a lot of uncertainty in what we’re calling ‘spent,’” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank where he has analyzed COVID relief spending.

I imagine that much of this is going to be covered in this "ESSER Mythbusting" webinar from Allovue next Tuesday. If advocating for school finance is part of your universe, you might sign up (I have!).