The $190 billion earmarked for school districts to recover from the pandemic was supposed to trickle out by the end of this school year.

Instead, districts reliant on the funding had their access abruptly cut off on March 28 , when the U.S. Department of Education informed state education chiefs that continuing to fund pandemic recovery in schools no longer met the department’s priorities.

For some districts, this means that essential student services like intensive tutoring, social-emotional supports, and plans for summer school programs have come to a screeching halt. The sudden decision has left districts struggling to honor their payments to third-party vendors they had contracted to tutor students or provide curricula, among other commitments.

As a result, districts have either terminated these programs immediately or are scrambling to find other funding sources to continue them.

“It’s not like dollars that I had sitting on a ledger, but I hadn’t planned the use of, or I hadn’t encumbered or signed contracts for, or the services hadn’t started. These are things that actually are in implementation—services are being delivered right now,” said Nakia Towns, the executive director of Accelerate, a national tutoring nonprofit that works with states to scale high-dosage tutoring efforts.

In response, on April 10, 16 states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit against the Education Department and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, stating that the “arbitrary and capricious” action violated the Administrative Procedure Act. The lawsuit appealed to a federal judge to direct the Education Department to honor the spending extensions .

In the meantime, though, this abrupt decision stands to affect students who are still a few grade levels behind in reading and math, as this year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress results indicate. For many states, the federal pandemic relief funds were a way to supply essential statewide interventions to improve reading and math proficiency levels, especially in early grades, said Mindy Sjoblom, the founder and chief executive officer of OnYourMark, an online tutoring provider.

Now, students could lose that extra support this spring and summer, and potentially in the next school year as well.

States pull back from tutoring

For OnYourMark, spring, a usually busy time for sales from school districts, has been much quieter with the gradual and then sudden end to the pandemic relief funding, Sjoblom said.

That’s not surprising, considering that districts in states like Kansas , New Jersey , Maryland , and Illinois , have had to pause academic recovery efforts like tutoring and other mental health supports, or dip into local funding sources to make up the shortfall. The Baltimore city district, which serves over 76,000 students, most of whom are from low-income households, had to immediately stop tutoring services across 28 sites when they lost access to $48 million in their remaining federal aid.

Sjoblom said federal dollars had helped districts cover a significant chunk of tutoring costs, which can add up to a couple of thousand dollars per student. Districts typically cover less than a third of the costs, which means that without the federal funds, paying tutors could become financially unsustainable for school systems.

“States were not in a position to be looking for other dollars [to fund these services],” said Kunjan Narechania, the chief executive officer of Watershed Advisors, an education consulting firm that partners with states to implement education reforms. “Given that they’d already received the extension, they were banking on this money.”

The abrupt expiration of the pandemic relief aid is a double blow for school districts, who have already had to tighten their budgets due to declining student enrollment and rising costs, she added.

Money left on the table could have supported essential services

The lawsuit filed by the states detailed how much federal money 15 of the states and the District of Columbia had left to liquidate.

The lawsuit also describes the impact of the loss of the federal aid on tutoring services and other academic recovery efforts. For instance, schools on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona had planned to spend a portion of their remaining funds on tutoring for reading and math.

Some states will also have to dismiss some teachers and other staff members because the district has to use the money for their salaries to meet remaining financial obligations, the lawsuit alleges.

Similarly, in Delaware, Maryland, and D.C., the lawsuit states that a part of their extension funds was earmarked to continue “science of reading” interventions, supporting staff salaries for those who tutored in-school—in addition to external vendors—and for training teachers in new instructional frameworks that would accelerate student learning.

Additionally, D.C. estimated that it would have to terminate tutoring for 1,900 students.

The New Jersey Department of Education risks losing a literacy specialist who worked with schools to implement programs to recuperate the pandemic-induced learning loss among students, according to the lawsuit.

McMahon’s letter informing states about the canceled funds stated that the Education Department would review appeals on a case-by-case basis. But Towns, from Accelerate, worries that the significant reduction in the Department’s workforce could mean delays in reviewing any appeals.

The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Can districts pivot to other sources of funding to meet obligations?

Districts can dip into other funding sources to recover the money they’ve already spent on tutoring and academic recovery programs. These options include Title I money, which is meant for high-needs schools, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the federal special education law. State sources of funding also exist. Districts in California, for instance, can turn to the state-funded Extended Learning Opportunities Grant, which provides funds to districts for after-school and summer enrichment programs for students up to 6th grade.

These pivots, though, aren’t easy to make mid-year, when schools have already budgeted money for their programming, said Narechania. Finding fresh dollars is a time-consuming process, and it could also mean defunding some other program that was benefiting students.

“Taking money away from things that have been funded for a long time isn’t easy. Districts will need state support to do that kind of budgeting and evaluation,” Narechania added.

This bureaucratic hurdle will affect rural or smaller district more, said Jeremy Anderson, the principal research manager at the California School Board Association. Anderson and his team spent last year advising school boards on what steps to take once the federal relief funding ran out. The intervention helped school boards work with their districts to reduce their dependency on the funding, but the sudden stop is still a shock to the districts, he said.

Title I funding may provide districts with some flexibility to pay for the stalled services, but applying for state-level grants means navigating yet another bureaucratic hurdle, said Anderson.

“Smaller districts, [where the] superintendent is the principal [and] fulfilling both roles, might be disproportionately impacted in their ability to seek out grants quickly,” he said. "[There are] equity issues here across the board.”

Districts and states now need to be self-reliant to avoid uncertainty

The Metro Nashville Public Schools, managed to soften the blow in advance. The district worked with the city government to earmark funds for high-impact tutoring in the city’s budget for this school year.

Sarah Chin, the chief strategy officer for the district, said local ecosystems need to be prepared now to absorb the chaos and uncertainty stemming from the way education policy is shaping up. MNPS has been able to show the Nashville government which tutoring programs have shown promising results to secure continued funding for them.

MNPS uses a mix of online and in-person tutoring during the school day, a model that Chin said the school system prefers over after-school tutoring because of attendance issues.

“We deliver the majority of our tutoring during personalized learning time [in schools], which is time that kids have for enrichment or to receive interventions. We really strive to provide as much artillery as possible during that block,” said Chin.

MNPS also shared with local leaders what inputs are needed to get those outcomes—the number of hours spent on lessons, attendance rates, and the number of tutors—to show how the money will be spent. Chin cited the most recent NAEP scores as evidence that the focus on high-impact tutoring has worked: The district’s students showed gains in math and English/language arts that outpaced the state average.

Using stricter accountability measures has worked in Louisiana, too, where the state has earmarked $30 million dollars for tutoring in the current school year. The allocation comes as part of a local law, under which districts are required to embed high-dosage tutoring during the school day for specific students in kindergarten through 5th grade, who score below grade-level proficiency in math and ELA.

Like other states, Louisiana initially used federal pandemic relief funds to kick off its tutoring efforts, said Kelli Bottger, the founder and executive director of Louisiana Kids Matter, a nonprofit that works with state government on education policy.

Bottger, who worked closely with the state’s education leaders on passing the tutoring law, said the Bayou State also created a dashboard of how the pandemic recovery dollars were being spent.

“Anybody in the public or legislature could go and see how each district was spending their dollars. It created public accountability where they didn’t want people to see, ‘oh, crap, we’re building football fields and baseball fields,’” said Bottger. It pushed districts to spend money on tutoring.

The dashboard also helped keep track of how much money remained to be spent from the state’s $4.2 billion ESSER allocation. In 2023, the state saw it had a substantial chunk left, and mandated that districts spend that money on more intense tutoring in math and ELA. With the help of those funds, Louisiana’s 4th graders are scoring higher in reading now than they were before the start of the pandemic—the only state that’s made statistically significant progress in that area since 2019.

As more students meet proficiency levels, Bottger said districts can slim their tutoring budgets to focus on fewer students. This can help districts pick up a larger share of the tab, instead of being increasingly dependent on state or federal dollars.

Louisiana’s legislative approach is now being followed by states like Connecticut and New Mexico, who are consulting with Bottger to frame similar laws on high-dosage tutoring.

The shift in federal funding priorities will put the spotlight on states, and how they can help to carry on essential services like high-dosage tutoring, especially as students remain on the path to academic recovery.

“This happens in education programming a lot. There’s money for something, we say we’re going to do it, the money runs out, and we don’t have a way to continue things that work,” said Narechania.