A fifth-grade science class at Saddle Mountain Unified School District, located about fifty miles outside of Phoenix, had no teacher on the first day of the new school year. The instructor who was meant to be there had left the previous week to accept a higher-paying position in a nearby district. A paraprofessional intervened. Three more teachers had made threats to quit by the end of that first day.
To put it simply, the district cannot afford raises. This is because Saddle Mountain incorporated the salaries of the mental health professionals it hired with federal pandemic relief funds—roughly $200,000 annually—into the regular operating budget. There had to be a compromise. There were no raises. The instructors began to depart.
From within a school, the end of the COVID relief cliff appears like this.
Through the ESSER program, Congress allotted about $190 billion in education relief, which is more than one-fifth of all K–12 spending in the United States in a single year and the largest one-time federal education appropriation in American history. The funds were intended to be used as emergency funds for certain, limited crises, such as absenteeism, mental health support, learning loss recovery, and remote learning infrastructure. September 2024 marked the expiration of the last significant block. For the majority of the remaining funds, the final spending deadline passed in January 2025. The country’s report card, which was released the day after that deadline, revealed some very unsettling information: overall student achievement is either stagnant or declining.
The funds are no longer available. The academic rehabilitation is not complete. The employees hired to oversee the successful programs are departing, and the programs themselves are being dismantled.
| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Topic | End of federal COVID-19 education relief funding (ESSER) and its impact on U.S. public schools |
| Total Federal Relief | ~$190 billion in ESSER funds — over one-fifth of total U.S. K-12 spending in 2022 |
| Final Spending Deadline | September 2024 (last $122 billion expired); January 28, 2025 final date for most remaining funds |
| Fund Name | ESSER — Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief fund |
| Key Research Finding | High-poverty districts with larger ESSER allocations per student showed larger gains in math/reading (2023) |
| Chicago/Fulton County Study | High-dosage tutoring funded by pandemic aid produced measurable bumps in math and reading scores |
| Case Study 1 | Saddle Mountain Unified School District, Arizona (~3,300 students) — used funds for mental health staff; now can’t fund raises; losing teachers |
| Case Study 2 | Minneapolis — closed $110M funding gap; cutting associate teachers, leaving vacancies unfilled, reducing magnet school budgets |
| Case Study 3 | Alabama — funding summer camps with state dollars; Chilton County dropped after-school program (would cost 30% of total budget to maintain) |
| Key Challenge | Many districts used one-time funds for ongoing expenses (staff, raises, programs) they cannot now sustain |
| Biden White House Proposal | $8 billion grant program for academic recovery — considered unlikely to pass Congress |
| Expert Quote | Marguerite Roza, Georgetown Edunomics Lab: “Districts are going to have to be more adaptive in this situation.” |
| Disproportionate Impact | High-poverty and urban districts received more aid — and now face steeper cuts |
The fact that districts made different decisions complicates the overall picture of what transpired with the $190 billion. Some made one-time purchases with the money, such as Chromebooks, building repairs, or infrastructure that doesn’t need constant upkeep. Others used one-time funds for recurring costs, such as new programs, permanent staff additions, and increases in teacher salaries. The same administrators made both decisions, frequently at the same time, because they were aware that the funds had an expiration date and that the needs at hand were urgent and genuine. The superintendent of Saddle Mountain put it bluntly: the workload on current employees was intolerable without the mental health hires. As a result, they employed individuals they were unable to pay. The alternative was to watch their current staff fail, so they went ahead and did it anyhow.
According to research from the Education Lab at the University of Chicago, some of the spending options were worth defending. In Chicago public schools and Fulton County, Georgia, districts that used pandemic funds for high-intensity tutoring—tutoring integrated into the school day rather than provided as an elective add-on—saw quantifiable improvements in reading and math scores. Although the data is preliminary, the direction is consistent with other findings that indicate higher academic gains were made by high-poverty districts that received more ESSER dollars per student than by comparable districts that received smaller allocations.
The issue is that school boards dealing with budget deficits are simultaneously responding to two distinct questions: “it works” and “we can afford to keep it.” Minneapolis reduced support for its magnet schools, eliminated associate teachers, and left open positions in order to close a $110 million funding gap for the current school year. While Chilton County completely discontinued its after-school program because maintaining it would have taken up thirty percent of the district’s total operating budget, state legislators in Alabama covered the cost of summer reading and math camps that pandemic funds had been covering—a true demonstration of policy continuity.
On the periphery, a federal mechanism may be helpful. States are permitted to set aside up to three percent of their allotment for direct student services, such as tutoring, under Title I, the long-running program that provides federal funds to schools serving low-income students. Researchers at Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research have been urging states to activate this rarely used provision because they believe it could support at least some of the high-impact interventions that ESSER funded but are currently being discontinued.
Whether that kind of targeted redirecting will be sufficient and whether there is the political will at the state level to implement it are still unknown. State budgets are a problem in and of themselves: states are witnessing surpluses turn into deficits as the federal pandemic aid that supplemented K–12 education also flowed to state governments generally. The kids in the classrooms in between are the ones who bear the brunt of the huge gap between what schools can maintain with permanent revenue and what they built with temporary funding.
