Use it or lose it: California schools race to spend the last of their pandemic funds

By Carolyn Jones (CALMATTERS) – Despite the dire forecast for education funding, some California schools may soon find themselves doing something counter-intuitive: returning money to the government. The deadline for committing federal COVID-19 relief money is Sept. 30, and schools that haven’t planned to spend their money by then or received an extension must send it back to the U.S. Department of Education. “It’s not a hard fiscal cliff, but it’s a big deal because it’s the last time districts can make decisions about how to spend this money,” said Bella DiMarco, a policy analyst for FutureEd, an education think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. “Some districts have been planning for this from Day One, but others are going to be scrambling at the last minute.” Dozens of California school districts still hadn’t spent the majority of their Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Act money as of Aug. 28, according to a database compiled by Georgetown’s Edunomics Laboratory. In some cases, districts risked leaving millions of dollars on the table. Overall, California schools hadn’t yet spent $1.8 billion of the $13.5 billion they were allotted when the final – and largest – of the pandemic...