(Source: MIRS.news, Published 04/15/2024) A new Mackinac Center for Public Policy report shows a large amount of COVID-19 school relief funds went to bolster salaries, both in charter and public schools.
The report, named "COVID Cash: How Michigan Schools Spent Their Extra Pandemic Funds," reviewed how local public and charter schools spent money allocated to them through federal and state grants during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Between the two, 67 percent was spent on salaries, purchased services and benefits. The report indicated that many charter schools contract teachers and their services are billed as purchased services.
"One plausible reason schools might spend such a large amount of pandemic relief on employee compensation is to hire new employees to address learning losses. State data show, however, that staffing levels did not increase significantly over this period. This suggests that schools used their COVID relief funds to boost the pay of existing employees rather than hire more of them," the report states.
The report points to three separate waves of COVID-19 spending from 19 different grants that equaled about $5.9 billion in extra funding. Between 2020 and 2023, schools in Michigan spent $86 billion in total.
Schools spent $2.8 billion of the $5.9 billion over three years ending in 2022. Districts have until September 2024 to spend the other half of the funding.
The report indicates overall staffing levels show districts added nearly 5,000 employees in the 2021 to 2022 school year.
The Citizens Research Council (CRC) found in a recent report that 5,100 teachers were in danger of losing funding over the next several years as the COVID-19 funding ends.
"Balancing K-12 school budgets over the next couple of years is likely going to involve some tough decisions around staffing levels, including laying off some teachers," the CRC report stated.
The CRC report points to the same funding as the Mackinac report in citing the drawdown of teacher staff at schools across the state, calling it the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief "funding cliff," citing a Bridge story by Isabel Lohman in March.
The CRC report states that K-12 funding was continuing to grow, but the high-water mark in state per-pupil funding seems to have peaked during the 2023-2024 school year. The 2024-2025 proposed budget, seems to be "back on track" with pre-pandemic numbers, leading to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer looking elsewhere to keep the budget on track.
Meanwhile, the State Board of Education recently has reignited the idea that charter schools should be regulated more, with the passage of a resolution calling for the Legislature to do more to open charter schools up to more scrutiny.
