California school districts in line for $6.8B in aid

The COVID-19 relief legislation that Congress passed on Monday will provide at least $6.8 billion to California’s school districts and charter schools. That equals about an eighth of the $54.9 billion that Congress will award to K-12 schools.

This assumes President Donald Trump signs the legislation. Late Tuesday, he threatened not to. Although both bills passed by veto-proof majorities, the president objected that the checks for individuals, a cornerstone of the bill, should be $2,000 per person, triple what’s in the bill. It’s unclear what will happen next.

The latest federal funding in the bill is about four times as much as the $13.5 billion in aid that went to K-12 schools under the CARES Act that Congress passed in March. But the combination of the two — about $70 billion — is substantially less than the $98 billion that Congress provided K-12 under the economic recovery act that Congress funded in the midst of the Great Recession a decade ago, said Michael Griffith, a national expert on school finance who is a senior researcher and policy analyst at the Palo Altobased Learning Policy Institute.

The latest round should be “really helpful to meet the short-term costs of COVID and some of the budget shortfalls facing states,” Griffith said. But it won’t be enough to address the extra funding needed to address the lost learning that a substantial number of students are experiencing. Those extra costs distinguish the current pandemic-precipitated recession from the Great Recession, Griffith said.

President-elect Joe Biden has vowed to return to Congress early next year for more money for schools.

The $6.8 billion in new funding for districts and charter schools in California will vary widely per student because it will be tied to how much districts received last year in federal Title I funding — a complex formula determined by the poverty rate and other factors.

Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest district, alone will receive $1.2 billion — $2,756 per student, and Capistrano Unified in Orange County, with a low rate of poverty, will receive $15.4 million — $331 per student, according to EdSource calculations.

Although the money is distributed by Title I funding, the legislation lets districts spend the money for students districtwide on a wide range of COVID-related purposes. Districts will have until Sept. 30, 2022, to spend it.

Districts that receive negligible Title I funding are likely to complain that they face some of the same health and safety costs in personal protective equipment, ventilation improvements, teacher training and sanitizing expenses as do high-poverty districts. Receiving no Title I funding, and therefore no federal

COVID assistance this round are 253 charter schools and 89 school districts. Although most are tiny, rural districts, 10 have more than 1,000 students, including the 11,000-student Fremont Union High School District in Sunnyvale; though it had some income-eligible families, the district did not apply for Title I funding.