What ESSER Funding Did for K-12 Schools During COVID-19

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The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, known as ESSER, was federal pandemic aid for K-12 schools: $190.315 billion across three rounds. It supported school operations and expanded learning time. Districts studied by the Government Accountability Office set their own spending priorities, and state officials screened what they proposed.

Districts had to commit the last of the money to specific purposes by the final deadline, September 30, 2024, though payments could follow after that date. Two questions remain for parents and taxpayers. Did the spending work? Spending records show what a district bought, not whether its students caught up. And what happens to programs the grant paid for? A district that wants to keep one has to find money for it after the grant ends.

The emergency fund grew into a recovery fund

Congress created ESSER as part of its response to the coronavirus emergency under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, on March 27, 2020. Two further laws followed: the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act on December 27, 2020, and the American Rescue Plan Act on March 11, 2021.

The Congressional Research Service reports that the three rounds received $13.229 billion, $54.311 billion and $122.775 billion, respectively, for a total of $190.315 billion in appropriations. The American Rescue Plan amount included $800 million to identify and assist children and youth experiencing homelessness.

The final round, commonly called ARP ESSER, required districts to reserve part of their money for evidence-based learning-recovery interventions. The program had moved beyond the immediate question of how to operate during an emergency to the longer task of addressing its effects on students.

Federal money, state distribution, local choices

ESSER grants went to state education agencies, which had to pass at least 90 percent of their funding to local education agencies, including school districts. The grant flowed through education agencies; it was not a household payment for which a parent submitted a federal application.

Title I, Part A provides supplemental federal financial assistance to school districts for children from low-income families. State shares were based on their shares of Title I, Part A education funding in fiscal year 2019 for the first round and fiscal year 2020 for the later rounds. Within each state, the required district subgrants were proportional to each district’s share of Title I, Part A grants. Using that existing program tied emergency allocations to a measure of poverty, rather than giving every district the same grant.

In a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study, districts set spending priorities while state officials screened proposed activities for their connection to pandemic needs. State officials sometimes differed on which activities they considered allowable.

Districts that received money from the first round, CARES Act ESSER I, had to provide equitable services to private-school students and teachers, and private schools could also get help through a separate program, Emergency Assistance to Non-Public Schools (EANS). Equitable services meant educational help and supplies comparable to those available in public schools, with a public agency keeping control of the money and property.

Broad spending authority, with a recovery requirement

Permitted uses included educational technology, meals during closures, summer and afterschool learning, mental health services and work to reduce virus transmission in school buildings. The American Rescue Plan specifically allowed indoor-air-quality projects, including heating, ventilation and air conditioning inspection, repair, replacement and upgrades.

District construction, renovation and capital heating, ventilation and air conditioning projects required prior written state approval under Education Department guidance. Districts also needed documentation that costs were necessary, reasonable and pandemic-related, and projects had to meet applicable federal grant and construction requirements.

Districts had to reserve at least 20 percent of their ARP ESSER money to address learning loss through evidence-based interventions. The law listed summer learning or enrichment, extended-day programs, comprehensive afterschool programs and extended-school-year programs as examples. This was a minimum recovery commitment, not a rule that every dollar had to purchase tutoring.

The required interventions had to respond to students’ academic, social and emotional needs and address the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on specified student groups. The law’s learning-loss provisions named low-income students, children with disabilities, English learners, racial and ethnic minorities, students experiencing homelessness and children and youth in foster care.

The statute also permitted activities needed to maintain district operations and continuity of services, including continuing to employ existing staff.

What spending records show schools bought

The GAO report, published in 2024, found about $57.3 billion in district spending through school year 2021-22. This is an early spending snapshot, not a final accounting of the entire program.

About 80 percent of that spending addressed students’ academic, social and emotional needs or continuing school operations. Approximately 20 percent addressed physical health and safety or mental health supports. That 20 percent is a reporting category; it is not the 20 percent of ARP ESSER money that districts had to reserve for learning loss.

Among the 17 districts GAO visited, 15 reported adding instructional time through afterschool programming, summer school or a longer school year. Ten reported buying new curricula, and eleven reported funding teacher training or professional development. A count of districts offering a service does not show how many students received it.

One district in GAO’s study paid bus drivers while schools were closed early in the pandemic. District officials said that kept drivers employed until in-person instruction resumed and reduced the risk that they would leave for other jobs.

Another district used ESSER to staff and furnish Reset Centers in its middle and high schools. According to district officials, students with minor disciplinary infractions typically spent one period there before returning to class.

Did students catch up? The evidence has limits

The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results showed fourth-grade reading scores remained below their 2019 level. That result cannot show whether the aid helped: the relevant comparison is what would have happened without it.

The Education Recovery Scorecard is a collaboration between Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research and Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project. The Education Recovery Scorecard study, Federal Pandemic Relief and Academic Recovery, concluded that federal relief contributed to recovery during the 2022-23 school year. One of its approaches compared high-poverty districts with similar prior achievement trends but different relief allocations. The researchers found that scores in the higher-grant districts rose more in math and reading between 2022 and 2023 than in the comparison districts, while noting wide confidence intervals around the estimates.

The same research found that an approach using fluctuations in district poverty estimates produced its most imprecise results, which were consistent both with no effect from the aid and with the study’s other estimates.

A July 2026 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Jeffrey Clemens, Philip G. Hoxie and Stan Veuger studied districts with poverty shares near 5 percent, where a funding threshold gave some districts more aid. In those districts, the paper reported, federal funds were passed on to residents through lower local revenue collections, including property taxes, and district spending per pupil did not increase. The authors found no evidence that the extra funds reduced declines in test scores.

The two studies examine different districts and use different comparisons, so neither result can simply be applied to every district. GAO also cautioned that isolating the effect of an individual district activity was difficult because districts launched multiple activities during the pandemic.

Where accountability starts for parents and taxpayers

ARP ESSER required districts to publish a plan for the safe return to in-person instruction and continuity of services on their websites within 30 days of receiving funds. Districts had to seek public comments and take them into account before publishing that plan. Start with the district’s published plan and ask its finance office for expenditure records showing how the planned services were funded.

The Education Department established quarterly and annual reporting requirements through its grant process, covering expenditures, subgrant recipients where applicable, and administration. Ask whether a published figure is an allocation, a planned purchase or an expenditure before comparing it with a student outcome.

The Education Department’s Office of Inspector General issued an audit of Washington state’s district-plan oversight on September 20, 2023. The inspector general found that Washington’s review and approval process was inadequate to ensure plans met all applicable requirements, leaving the public with insufficient insight into planned spending. The audit also said Washington responded to the issues and began corrective action during the review. That was a documented transparency and oversight weakness, not proof that every affected purchase was fraudulent or ineffective.

The money ended before every decision was finished

The final ARP ESSER obligation deadline was September 30, 2024. Obligating money meant committing it to a specific purpose; a state’s subgrant to a district did not count until the district made that commitment. Liquidation, the spending or payment stage, generally had a deadline 120 days after the obligation deadline, though states could request extensions for districts. That is why payments could continue after the deadline for committing funds.

An extension, which a state had to request, could add up to 14 months; for ARP ESSER, that period ended March 28, 2026, according to a Congressional Research Service report. It describes further extensions as discretionary, with Education Department policy limiting consideration to extraordinary circumstances or lengthy construction contracts. An unfinished project does not itself establish that federal payment is still available. Now that March 28, 2026, has passed, ask the district finance office what expiration date it was approved for, whether a request for more time was submitted on time, and what was decided.

A dispute over access to extended payment periods led to New York v. U.S. Department of Education in the Southern District of New York, in which a group of states challenged the Education Department’s termination of funding. On November 17, 2025, the district court approved a stipulation, an agreement between the states and the government, that paused the case. The order kept the case on hold while timely payment requests were decided, let the plaintiff states resume the lawsuit if the government did not keep its commitments, and called for the states to drop the case after final decisions.

On March 28, 2025, the department announced that its extended payment period for pandemic education funds would end at 5 p.m. Eastern that day. Under that stipulation, the government agreed not to shorten the plaintiff states’ liquidation extensions approved before March 28, 2025. It also agreed to make reasonable, good-faith efforts to promptly decide pending payment requests and pay approved requests in the ordinary course. A promise to process a timely request is different from a promise to approve it. Those protections concerned the participating states and previously approved funding; they did not create a new nationwide round of school aid.

The end of the grant also left some districts facing a funding cliff, which arises when a temporary grant supports a cost that continues, such as staffing or an ongoing tutoring contract. In GAO’s district interviews, some officials said they would discontinue successful programs because no replacement funding was available. Other districts planned to use natural staff departures to avoid layoffs of employees hired with ESSER money.

Stanford’s National Student Support Accelerator reported that districts sustaining tutoring tied it to existing academic support systems and other federal, state or general-fund resources. Some also used local partnerships, universities and tutor pipelines to reduce costs and build longer-term capacity. Districts that paused, ended or sharply reduced tutoring reported obstacles including high vendor costs and limited capacity to build in-house programs.

For a family asking whether an ESSER-funded service will survive, the next useful question is where its continuing budget comes from.