South Carolina schools received more than $3.2 billion in federal COVID-19 relief funds since 2020 to help contend with the pandemic’s impact.

Districts across the state and nation tapped the funds to pay for tutoring, summer camps, air filtration systems and salaries, among other needs. In all, the federal government showered $190 billion on America’s schools through three waves of funding known as ESSER, short for the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief fund.

Researchers and administrators said the cash shored up student achievement during the worst of the pandemic, but it also came with an expiration date: Sept. 30, 2024.

With that deadline speeding toward them, district leaders must figure out how to adjust budgets that benefited from the infusion of federal dollars that will no longer be there, even though data and educators say students still need help in critical subject areas — a funding dilemma some have dubbed the ESSER cliff. 

The funding halt will mean cutbacks to programs and staff who help students learn, another blow to a school environment where math scores still lag behind pre-pandemic numbers and rising numbers of students are missing weeks of instruction each year. 

But administrators across the state also told The Post and Courier they’ve been able to fit many of the federally funded jobs and initiatives into their regular budgets as they sought to avoid an abrupt end to important services as much as possible. 

“We are not on the ESSER cliff,” said Laura Showe, the Florence One school district’s chief financial officer.

How districts spent their millions

For four summers, thousands of students near Columbia have felt the impact of the Richland Two district’s ESSER dollars directly. 

The federal funding let the district put on a full-day summer instructional program, called SOAR, keeping thousands of elementary and middle schoolers in the classroom for part of the break. The program helps students make up their deficits from the previous year or get a jump on the next.

Since starting as a necessity in 2021 — when the district officials said they realized the depth of COVID-19’s impact on students’ academics and mental health — the program also gave students access to psychologists and counselors in a bid to tamp down an increase in anxiety and behavioral issues. 

The students were at school for a full day, helping keep up the routine the school year provides and giving kids more of the social interaction they might have lost during pandemic lockdowns. 

“We gave them a real school experience,” said Arthur Newton, the district’s executive director of elementary instruction. 

A regular school experience is exactly what students lost as the pandemic hit in 2020, forcing schools to shift into potentially isolating and routine-shattering online learning, to which Newton attributes a rise in “school anxiety” — and which correlates to a sharp plunge in students’ test scores. 

Thanks to federal funding requirements, the first ESSER funding infusion was largely aimed at the new reality of remote learning and making schools safer once students started to return, seeking pre-pandemic normalcy. Schools put money toward extra cleaning, wellness programs, air filtration systems and more furniture to help space out students. 

The two larger rounds of funding that followed widened the requirements, more broadly addressing students’ pandemic-driven learning loss. Schools implemented summer programs similar to Richland Two’s SOAR alongside other academic aids such as tutoring, after-school programs and more instructional staff.   

Charleston County schools used $52.5 million to hire more support staff in schools and provide professional development for teachers, and set aside $30.2 million to address the unique needs of certain student demographics such as multilingual learners, students with disabilities and those in poverty.

In Iva, the Anderson Three district hired a multilingual learners teacher to serve that growing population. Chester County’s schools used the money to add 18 reading and math interventionists, and Fort Mill schools brought on seven new positions. 

Some districts, including Aiken and Anderson Three, also made capital improvement projects such as building repairs. 

“This took away funds that could have been used in other academic areas, but we felt like the capital improvements were necessary due to the stipulations of the funding and what it could be used for,” Anderson Three spokesman Dylan McCullough said.

What’s staying, what’s going

With ESSER dollars evaporating a month into the 2024-25 school year, district budget writers had to make hard decisions: Which federally funded initiatives can they fit into their annual budgets, and which ones can they afford? 

In Charleston, the district’s new weighted student funding model prioritizes the needs of students disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, distributing $32.8 million of additional funds above what schools usually receive based on schools’ amount of students in poverty, multilingual learners and students with disabilities.

Campuses will be able to maintain the majority of their personnel and programs associated with ESSER, said Daniel Prentice, the district’s chief finance officer, in an interview with The Post and Courier. 

Principals will be in charge of distributing the funds they receive and will decide how to spend the money based on the needs of their schools. The district has developed a list of guardrails and guidelines that indicate how funds are allowed to be spent.

Schools that wanted to retain positions supported by ESSER funds completed an impact report to link the success of the position to student outcome, Superintendent Anita Huggins said, which was scored by the district to figure out which programs were effective enough to continue.

“Anything that didn’t meet the threshold for being a truly effective program moving forward wasn’t continued on virtue of its effectiveness, not on virtue of the availability of funding,” Prentice said.

The district spent $3 million on projects that ultimately were not authorized under the relief program, which spurred allegations that Huggins and previous superintendent Don Kennedy improperly directed some of the funding. Huggins has denied the allegations, which came in a June letter written by a former executive director of the district’s federal programs.

Elsewhere in the state, administrators said many programs and jobs previously funded by ESSER dollars will continue. 

Students in West Columbia and Cayce will continue to get after-school tutoring in the Lexington Two district. In the Upstate, Greenville County schools will continue their summer programming, as will Pickens County campuses, which received outside support from the United Way to keep its summer reading initiatives. 

Employees in Florence One will keep a health insurance subsidy, which was originally ESSER-funded and covers up to 100 percent of insurance premiums for the district’s lowest-paid employees.

But the simple math that comes from falling funding means cuts will happen, leaving students with fewer resources to aid their learning. 

Richland Two’s summer instructional program, for example, won’t continue into the summer of 2025, and neither will some extended day programming, leaving schools to try and avoid the “summer slide” themselves. It and neighboring Richland One, in Columbia, are cutting nearly 200 positions combined, with Richland One also trimming back its Summer Learning Academy and mental health programs. 

“Without having the instruction, without having the social-emotional aspect of SOAR, common sense would tell me that students aren’t going to always get what they need,” Newton said of the summer program’s end. 

Other districts are pulling back spending from some educational software tools. 

Finance officials often tried to avoid using the one-time funding for recurring costs such as salaries, but at times did so anyway. 

Some, such as Pickens County, hired interventionists for just two years, knowing from the beginning that they’d be phased out when the funding expired.

Richland One and Greenville offered positions elsewhere in the district to ESSER-funded employees whose jobs were being cut — a consolation made easier by teacher shortage-fueled vacancies, another obstacle to student achievement. 

Did the spending help? 

A pair of studies released in June found that the federal funding helped student achievement in math and English nationwide. 

“The federal investment in helping public school students recover from the pandemic’s academic fallout has paid off. Not only did it lead to increased test score gains, but the investment also significantly reduced the educational inequality generated by the pandemic,” Sean Reardon, a Stanford education professor and co-author of a study from the Education Recovery Scorecard, said in a statement.

But the benefits weren’t spread equally. 

The pandemic hit low-income students and students of color the hardest academically, but a paper from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research found that the federal aid’s benefits were “concentrated” among White students — though the money went further, and helped more, in poorer districts. 

Even with the federal money’s boost to schools’ recoveries, South Carolina students still struggle to make up lost instruction, particularly in math, leaving educators hoping the resources and training they gained from ESSER will continue to aid students’ recovery. 

Caitlin Herrington contributed from Greenville, and Erin Weeks contributed from Aiken.