California school districts in line for $6.8B in aid

The Title I funding formula to be used to determine differences in federal assistance

T he COV ID-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

Alto-based Learning Policy Institute.

The latest round should be “really helpful to meet the shortterm 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 pandemicprecipitated 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 incomeeligible families, the district did not apply for Title I funding.

Last spring, Gov. Gavin Newsom augmented funding for K-12 schools with an additional $5.3 billion in “learning loss” funding, much of it in CARES Act dollars he had at his discretion. But in the latest round, Congress funded no new money for county and city governments. Funding for them was a bargaining chip in failed negotiations between Democrats and Republicans over giving businesses and school districts liability protection from being sued by employees and parents, in the case of school districts, who contract the coronavirus. They’ll argue that they now should be Newsom’s priority.

The total funding for education is $82 billion in the latest round of federal aid. It includes the $54.9 billion for K-12, $23 billion for higher education and $4 billion that governors can decide how to spend on education. However, $2.75 billion of that discretionary money must be given to private schools, targeting those serving low-income children.