{"id":6588,"date":"2021-11-15T20:57:08","date_gmt":"2021-11-15T20:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=6588"},"modified":"2021-11-15T20:57:08","modified_gmt":"2021-11-15T20:57:08","slug":"what-did-public-schools-do-with-covid-relief-money-whatever-they-wanted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=6588","title":{"rendered":"What Did Public Schools Do With COVID Relief Money? Whatever They Wanted."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n\n“The federal government sent around $190 billion in aid<\/a> to public schools across the nation during the COVID-19 pandemic. That is a lot of money by any standards, but in terms of federal spending on primary education, it is a shockingly large amount: as Reason<\/em>‘s Matt Welch explained when surveying the Biden administration’s weak moves toward promoting public school reopening<\/a> back in February, that’s more than four times as much as the federal government tended to push toward K-12 education a year in pre-COVID times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is the money being diligently used for its intended purpose? Of course not. A survey by ProPublica<\/a> found, when examining some of the “provisional annual reports\u2026by state education agencies” for about $3 billion worth of the aid from March to September of 2020, that “just over half of the $3 billion in aid was categorized as ‘other,’ providing no insight into how the funds were allocated.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the last school year, 15 states<\/a> constituting around a quarter<\/a> of the total U.S. population didn’t even manage to achieve 50 percent effective in-person education, the alleged purpose of all that federal COVID money.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“”The law places few restrictions on how districts can spend the federal aid, as long as the investments are loosely connected to the effects of the pandemic,” ProPublica explains, while noting that various districts, as reported by the Associated Press, are diverting the cash to athletics. The schools are supposed to spend all the money by 2024. The Associated Press\u00a0reports<\/a>\u00a0that although schools “are required to tell states how they’re spending the money\u2026some schools are using local funding for sports projects and then replacing it with the federal relief\u2014a maneuver that skirts reporting requirements.””<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/reason.com\/2021\/10\/22\/what-did-public-schools-do-with-covid-relief-money-whatever-they-wanted\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The federal government sent around $190 billion in aid to public schools across the nation during the COVID-19 pandemic. That is a lot of money by any standards, but in terms of federal spending on primary education, it is a shockingly large amount: as Reason’s Matt Welch explained when surveying the Biden administration’s weak moves toward promoting public school reopening back in February, that’s more than four times as much as the federal government tended to push toward K-12 education a year in pre-COVID times.<\/p>\n

Is the money being diligently used for its intended purpose? Of course not. A survey by ProPublica found, when examining some of the “provisional annual reports\u2026by state education agencies” for about $3 billion worth of the aid from March to September of 2020, that “just over half of the $3 billion in aid was categorized as ‘other,’ providing no insight into how the funds were allocated.”<\/p>\n

Over the last school year, 15 states constituting around a quarter of the total U.S. population didn’t even manage to achieve 50 percent effective in-person education, the alleged purpose of all that federal COVID money.”<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

“”The law places few restrictions on how districts can spend the federal aid, as long as the investments are loosely connected to the effects of the pandemic,” ProPublica explains, while noting that various districts, as reported by the Associated Press, are diverting the cash to athletics. The schools are supposed to spend all the money by 2024. The Associated Press reports that although schools “are required to tell states how they’re spending the money\u2026some schools are using local funding for sports projects and then replacing it with the federal relief\u2014a maneuver that skirts reporting requirements.””<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[588,409,483,356,161,1193,357,279,624],"class_list":["post-6588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-corona","tag-coronavirus","tag-covid-19","tag-education","tag-funding","tag-government-spending","tag-school","tag-spending","tag-stimulus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6588"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6589,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6588\/revisions\/6589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}