Superintendent Brian DeBernardi walks along the outside of Northwest Elementary School in LaSalle.
“You can see where this kind of juts out. None of this was here,” he says, pointing to a 15,000 square-foot addition to the school. It’s brand-new — kids just stepped in the doors last week.
Northwest is a small school where a majority of kids are low-income. And DeBernardi says they just didn’t have enough space for their students.
“We never had an art room, we never had a music room. We never had any space,” he said. “We were down to using storage closets and mechanical rooms to do a lot of things.”
They also renovated another wing of the school. None of it would be possible without ESSER or “Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief.” It’s pandemic relief money from the federal government.
School districts have had the past several years to spend that money, and it expires in about a month. We’re talking about millions of dollars, even in a smaller district like La Salle. DeBernardi says it made up a healthy portion of their budget.
And now that it’s gone -- are Illinois schools headed towards a financial cliff? Well, Angie Smith says it depends on how schools spent the money. She helps lead school business operations at the Aurora West School District and wrote her dissertation about the impact of ESSER.
Her district, like LaSalle, spent a lot of money on capital projects like new roofs and HVAC systems -- and they spent less money on hiring new teachers. She says that’s for a simple reason:
“This," said Smith, "is not permanent money."
So, they focused on one-time expenses instead of ongoing costs that’ll stick around even when the federal funding ends. But that’s not limited to construction. Many districts like Aurora West upgraded technology, gave teachers bonuses, and started summer school programs to get their students back on track after the initial disruption of the pandemic.
“We added people who were doing professional development for teachers,” she said. “We added restorative practice coaches that worked with students -- things that either weren't going to be long term or, in some cases, we piloted them and liked them, but then had to figure out what comes out of the budget to make room for that.”
In other words, Smith says, schools used the money to try new things, but now they’ve got to decide if they're worth keeping. Ann Williams at the U-46 district in Elgin says they also have to consider if these new programs, projects, and positions are helping students. Are they getting a solid return on their investment?
And, she says, that’s not always simple. It’s easier to think about with tutors. You pay for tutors. Did the tutoring help students improve in that area? Pretty straightforward. What about construction? Going from learning in a storage closet to a new classroom -- how much does that help students improve academically? Williams says a little harder to measure, but they try.
“We assess the impact of expenditures by evaluating their effects on the whole student, looking at the social emotional learning and development of students,” said Williams. “We have surveys for employee engagement that allow us to evaluate the success of some of our initiatives.”
Marguerite Rosa is the head of the research center Edunomics. She’s worried that many students are not back on track academically.
“In some schools, scores continued to decline, and then we would say, ‘whatever you spent it on, that did not work,’” she said. “In Illinois, broadly compared to most other states, we saw a pretty strong growth in reading, which was impressive, less so in math compared to other states.
In her ESSER dissertation, a question Angie Smith set out to answer was: are these funds going to lead to systemic change or is it just some extra money?
She says, because it’s a one-time thing, it’s just extra money. But some say this has made a lasting change. DeBernardi thinks about their new school addition and classroom renovations. Without ESSER, it may have taken another 20 years to build. Another whole generation of students come and gone without the adequate space they need to learn.
In LaSalle, students are performing better on state tests than pre-pandemic in both reading and math. But other districts are still playing catch up. And now they’re playing catch up without this extra money. And if they didn’t spend it wisely, with fewer resources to help their kids.
