After years of abundant pandemic funding, school districts across the country are facing budget shortfalls and pressures from multiple fronts.
$122 billion in federal funding to help schools recover from the pandemic will dry up in September, reducing school funding for tutoring, summer school and other supports that have funded pandemic recovery efforts for the past three years.
At the same time, falling birth rates and the growing school choice movement have led to declining student enrollment in some school districts.
As a result, school districts across the country will be forced to make tough decisions about cuts that could affect millions of families as early as next school year. The cuts, which many districts have put off during the pandemic, could hinder the recovery for American students, who have generally been unable to make up for losses caused by the pandemic.
“I'm concerned that too many state and district leaders have been turning a blind eye to the coming fiscal cliff, and now they're being forced to make some really tough decisions,” said Thomas S. Dee, a Stanford University professor who studies student enrollment trends.
The cuts are coming in districts ranging from wealthy to poor: In Edmonds, Washington, a high-middle-income area north of Seattle, a local foundation mobilized to raise more than $200,000 to save music classes after the district targeted them for cuts; and in upscale Montgomery County, Maryland, the district is slightly increasing class sizes to save money.
But experts say the cuts will hit lower-income and urban school districts hardest, as they received more of the federal pandemic aid and have also been hit hard by declining student enrollment.
When students leave public schools, districts receive less state and federal funding, and losing too many students can strain district budgets with fixed costs. Salaries and benefits, for example, typically account for about 80 percent of a district's budget.
Many school districts have been experiencing enrollment declines for years, but the pandemic “accelerated those declines,” Dr. Dee said. Dr. Dee's study found that U.S. public schools lost more than 1 million students between 2019 and 2022. About half of the decline can be explained by demographic trends, but much of the rest is due to continued interest in private schools and homeschooling, Dr. Dee found.
“It's clear that declining enrollment has been the new normal for some time now, at least two years,” he said.
High inflation in recent years has also pushed up costs. Many school districts gave bigger-than-usual raises to stay competitive, but now they're finding it harder to maintain them, said Margaret Rosa, director of the Edunomics Institute at Georgetown University.
At the same time, many states are experiencing slower revenue growth and “may not be in a position to give districts bigger increases than they normally would,” Dr. Roza said.
The current situation is especially perilous because some districts are using pandemic aid money to plug holes in their budgets.
That includes Minneapolis, which is facing a deficit of more than $100 million amid declining student enrollment and is cutting about 300 teacher positions.
Without the additional funding, Minneapolis likely would have had to lay off staff or make other dramatic changes sooner, just as students were beginning to recover from the pandemic, said Ibrahima Diop, the district's senior financial officer.
The district chose to continue investing in education, “which was what everybody should be doing, because it means we're supporting our students,” Diop said.
Hartford, Connecticut, made a similar trade-off: The district used stimulus money to fund 260 positions, including school counselors, social workers and learning assistants — jobs that Superintendent Leslie Torres Rodriguez said officials had heard “loud and clear” were needed to support students.
But districts that have been dealing with budget challenges and declining student enrollment are now having to move employees to other positions to reduce layoffs. “The districts facing the most severe crisis right now are the ones that have spent the most money on student services and programs,” Dr. Torres Rodriguez said.
Some districts have tried to avoid potential layoffs, but even they are planning program cuts.
Baltimore City Public Schools officials made investments “very carefully from the beginning” to avoid sudden cuts when relief funds ran out, said Alison Perkins Cohen, the district's chief of staff. District officials did not use the relief funds to hire new full-time school staff or raise teacher salaries, she said.
Instead, Baltimore provided tutoring, gave teachers temporary stipends and upgraded restrooms, science labs and air conditioning systems.
But Baltimore city will still have to cut some tutoring contracts and may have to scale back federally funded summer school programs next year.
The city of Waterbury, Connecticut, also avoided layoffs by trying not to hire many new staff members with relief funds, said Verna Ruffin, the district's superintendent.
Still, Ruffin said school officials won't be able to offer students 24/7 online tutoring next school year, and they will have to scale back after-school tutoring programs that give students opportunities to visit museums and see plays and concerts.
Birmingham, Alabama, is one of the school districts that has made great academic progress since the pandemic but now must decide which programs to keep.
An analysis by the Alabama Public Policy Research Council found that programs that give students extra instructional time during fall, winter and spring breaks have shown promising results.
But Birmingham Superintendent Mark Sullivan said the district had to cut one class over winter break and could no longer afford to pay participating teachers the higher wage of $60 an hour.
Free after-school programs that were subsidized with pandemic aid money would revert to a paid model, a change Dr. Sullivan was loathe to make because he knows the cost, about $160 per student per month, could be beyond the means of many poor and working-class parents in his district.
The district will also have to cut 70 staff positions that are being paid for with stimulus money.
Sullivan said he has no regrets about hiring mental health counselors, math and reading instructors and other specialists for short periods to help students get through the worst of the pandemic. The federal aid was a rare opportunity for his district, where money is tight and about 90% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.
“If we can provide students with the help they desperately need, even for a short period of time, then it will have been worth it,” he said.
