For poor schools, building renovations rob COVID relief money

For poorer school districts, deciding what to do with that money comes with a tough trade-off: work on long-term recovery or fix long-standing infrastructure problems.

JACKSON, Miss. The air conditioner failed when students returned from summer vacation last year to Jim Hill High School in Jackson, Mississippi, forcing them to study in sweltering heat. By Thanksgiving, students were huddled under blankets because the heating wasn’t working.

Along the way, the students dealt with broken showers in the locker rooms, plumbing problems and a host of other problems in the nearly 60-year-old school building.

“There were times when we were cold, there were times when we were hot,” said Menthia Trippeter, a 17-year-old high school student. “There were times when it rained and poured, we drowned. We’re going through this – we’re going through this, man.

Like other underprivileged schools around the country, Jim Hill has long faced neglected infrastructure that has made it harder for students to learn. So when Jackson Public Schools received tens of millions of dollars in federal COVID relief money, they decided to use most of the windfall to fix heating and plumbing problems, some of which temporarily forced the school to transition to remote learning.

For the poorer school districts, deciding what to do with that money has involved a tough trade-off: work towards a long-term recovery of academic achievement or fix long-standing infrastructure needs.

In total, the federal government has provided $190 billion in pandemic relief to schools, more than four times the amount the US Department of Education spends on K-12 schools in a typical year, and with few conditions.

An analysis by the Associated Press of spending plans for school districts across the country found that the poorest districts in each state are far more likely than the richest to spend emergency funds to upgrade their buildings or transportation systems.

Jackson’s academic needs are no less pressing. Most students in the district attended almost a year and a half during the pandemic, according to the Harvard and Stanford Education Recovery Scorecard, with math test scores plummeting by the equivalent of a full year of schooling. But school officials didn’t want to miss a rare opportunity to fix infrastructure problems, some dating back decades.

William Merritt, the school district’s chief of staff, said the funds gave the district the ability to “provide our students with the tools that other students in affluent districts have.”

The data for the AP analysis came from research firm Burbio, which analyzed how more than 6,000 counties across the country, representing more than 75% of the country’s public school students, planned to spend their federal money on aid. The data covers the latest and largest round of federal school aid totaling $122 billion.

The AP found that the school districts with the highest percentage of children living in poverty—the poorest 20% of districts in every state—are more than three times as likely as the richest school districts to give money to build new buildings or classrooms. High-poverty school districts were also more than twice as likely to include money for building renovations.

“Poor neighborhoods are doing this because they’re chasing emergencies,” said Mary Philardo, executive director of the 21st Century School Foundation.

Infrastructure is a prime example of a long-standing disparity in school funding. While wealthy areas can rely on local tax revenue to pay for large improvement projects, such as installing modern heating and ventilation systems, poorer areas often cannot spend more money over time on short-term repairs.

In Texas, the Victoria Independent School District is also grappling with competing infrastructure and pandemic recovery needs. It plans to spend half of the $28.4 million it received in the latest aid round on tuition, teacher retention, and student support, including social-emotional behavior specialists.

But the remaining 50% of the money goes towards improving air quality, such as upgrading ventilation systems. Superintendent Quintin Shepard says he’d like to spend more on counselors and less on fixing broken air conditioners, but kids can’t safely study in a 100-degree Fahrenheit (38-degree Celsius) classroom.

“We came into education to improve learning outcomes and life expectations. It’s hard to make such impossible decisions,” Shepherd said.

Some argue that money should not be spent on infrastructure projects, which can take years to complete and often do not provide immediate benefit to students. But the government demanded that only 20% of the emergency funds be spent on tackling the loss of training.

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a recent speech that the aid funding was “intended to accelerate reopening and recovery, not to make up for decades of underinvestment in education funding and student support.”

Marguerite Rosa, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, said the government did the right thing by allowing a high degree of flexibility in how aid funds are spent rather than getting bogged down in bureaucracy.

In Jackson, officials decided to spend more than half of the $109 million the district received in its latest round of federal funding to fix equipment at schools like Jim Hill.

Students at the school generally agreed that the infrastructure needed to be upgraded. However, when asked what they would do if given the task of spending the money on county needs, some had great desires.

“I think we could hire more teachers to teach different subjects,” said Elijah Fisher, 17. But he admitted that he would first use the money to fix the drainage system around the school.

Overall, officials in Jackson are confident they are making the right investment.

While most of the funding went to infrastructure needs, the school district also bought laptops for each student and invested in extracurricular programming. Jim Hill now offers a near-year-round school with a summer semester dedicated to field trips and “learn by doing” experiences.

Principal Bobby Brown said the money spent on infrastructure is much needed, though not enough to address decades of inequalities in the black-dominated school system.

“When you listen to students and families who have generations of similar experiences,” Brown said, “it also sheds light on the types of investments we have or the lack of investment we have in communities where people look like we are. .”

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