Sign up for Chalkbeat Chicago’s free daily newsletter to keep up with the latest education news.
For principals in Chicago, putting together a school budget has always involved difficult choices.
Then three years ago, a $2.8 billion windfall of federal COVID money for Chicago Public Schools, meant to help students recover from the pandemic, suddenly changed the equation.
At one school, where nearly all of the students came from low-income households, the additional money meant more after-school programs for everyone, tutoring for struggling students, open gym, and even a staff-created crafting class where students could get additional social-emotional support. Test scores went up and staff noticed fewer fights, said a former school administrator who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly.
“Winning the lottery is what it felt like,” she said. “Everything your kid ever asked for, you could give them.”
Research shows Chicago students are rebounding faster than other districts, particularly in reading, efforts such as tutoring are paying off, and the number of school social workers in CPS has doubled.
But the extra federal money that helped make that progress possible, known formally as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief or ESSER, is running out, meaning some of those programs could be curtailed or cut.
A Chalkbeat analysis of school budgets for the past three years found that federal COVID relief made up 7% of all the money that went to schools. And while officials said Monday they will not reduce the total amount of money dedicated to schools, they said some campuses’ “funding levels may change,” as they shift to a new funding formula that guarantees a minimum number of staff for all schools, according to a letter district officials sent to families and staff.
Next year, CPS plans to spend the last $300 million of its $2.8 billion allocation of federal COVID money, but will still face a $391 million deficit. CEO Pedro Martinez signaled recently that hard cuts, such as for critical building repairs, could be ahead but he wants to protect classrooms from losing resources.
Looking back, more than half of Chicago’s federal COVID money went to staff salaries and benefits. In an interview with Chalkbeat, Martinez said the federal COVID dollars helped the district avoid cuts because of a longstanding structural deficit – when expenses exceed revenue.
That deficit was a problem even before the pandemic for many reasons, he said, including the 2019 CTU contract, which committed to hiring more staff and increasing salaries and benefits. The district is once again negotiating new contracts with the Chicago Teachers Union and the union representing school support staff. Both will impact future school years when federal COVID money is gone.
Chalkbeat’s analysis of budget records and expenditure data from the past three years found the largest uses of COVID money at the school level were for reducing class sizes, supporting middle school programs, and expanding pre-K.
District officials said they want to preserve programs they believe have helped students, such as tutoring, professional development for teachers, after-school and summer programs, and investments in social-emotional learning. But some schools will be hit by changes next year.
For example, according to a presentation given last week to Local School Council members, some schools may lose their interventionists. These positions were created with federal COVID dollars to provide extra support to struggling students.
Next year, only Title I schools, which enroll large shares of students from low-income families, will be guaranteed interventionists.
Principals received their budgets Monday for next school year and could decide to pay for certain positions or programs using discretionary money. By early May, Local School Councils must vote on the budgets. Simultaneously, district officials are reviewing non-school spending and central office budgets before presenting a full budget to the school board for a vote in June.
“Literally every day, I kid you not, we’re going through all of our central office budgets, all of our operations, and seeing, ‘Where do we need to scale back?,’” Martinez said. “Our intention is going to be that as schools finish their budgets, we’re going to be able to protect those resources at the school level.”
How federal COVID money was spent at schools
At one Chicago school, which also serves many students from low-income families, having more adults in the building has made a big difference.
The school’s principal, who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak candidly, said the districtwide tutoring effort, known as Tutor Corps, allowed her to hire a handful of tutors who have “had a profound impact” on children who were struggling in reading and math and are now showing signs of improvement in those subjects.
The principal was also able to shrink class sizes by hiring more teachers. That was possible because the district decided to cover the salaries of two teachers the principal tapped to become interventionists. Because they were some of her most veteran teachers with high salaries, the principal said, that freed up a good chunk of money to hire other staff.
But the principal didn’t know that the district used federal COVID money to help pay for her school’s pre-K teachers, or that her school’s budget was covered by millions in relief dollars over the past three years.
“Wow, it didn’t feel like that,” she said, referring to the amount of money her school received.
The disconnect might stem from complicated budgeting practices. CPS must first spend money, then submit claims to the state to get reimbursed with federal COVID dollars, said Mike Sitkowski, budget director for CPS. In order to collect that money, which helped keep school budgets afloat, officials were “shifting expenses throughout the year” – which did not impact school operations, he said, but may have gone unnoticed by school communities.
Between July 2020 and June 30, 2023, Chicago Public Schools budgeted a total $1.4 billion in federal COVID dollars directly to schools. Another $1.2 billion was budgeted for centrally funded programs, including those rooted at schools, such as tutoring, one-on-one academic intervention for students who fell behind, and summer school.
Multiple educators were surprised to hear how much of the COVID relief dollars had been budgeted for their schools. Some parents and students have also felt in the dark about how the money got spent.
Hal Woods, chief of policy for advocacy organization Kids First Chicago, said without that knowledge or a tracker detailing where the money is going for each school, parents and schools aren’t able to “be in lockstep” if they want to advocate for more funding or raise questions about how funds are being spent.
Wallace Wilbourn Jr., a teacher at Oscar DePriest Elementary School on the West Side and a member of the school’s Local School Council, said he doesn’t know how most of the money was spent. He joined the LSC last year, but wasn’t aware of any conversations the school had with staff about how the money was being spent, even though the LSC votes on a school’s budget.
Between 2021 and 2023, nearly $2.2 million in federal COVID dollars was budgeted for DePriest. Expenditure data obtained by Chalkbeat through an open records request found slightly more than that – about $2.5 million – was spent.
DePriest had Tutor Corps tutors, Wilbourn said, an expense he supports because he felt many students needed the extra help as they returned to in-person school. Still, he wishes there was more transparency early on about the money.
“It’s nice to know what those dollars are being used for so then it gives you the power to advocate for those funds,” Wilbourn said.
Martinez said the district has been “very transparent” about how it was spending the federal dollars in multiple public presentations. However, Martinez said “it gets very technical, so I can understand why it’s confusing for folks.”
Asked how the COVID money was distributed, a spokesperson did not share an exact formula in time for this story. A spokesperson said schools received federal COVID dollars based on “stakeholder meetings” that focused on what schools’ needs were, such as class sizes and limited split classrooms, access to arts and other “specialty” classes, intervention supports, social and emotional supports, resuming in-person school, and professional development.
Chicago schools have uncertain financial future
The district has not yet detailed how it will fill its looming $391 million deficit. That’s the shortfall after using roughly $300 million in federal COVID money still left to spend.
Ralph Martire, executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, said the district shouldn’t have plugged the federal money into operating costs, such as salaries, because that created a cliff – a sudden loss of money that could mean the loss of programs and staff that directly impacts students.
“It’s very disruptive, right?” Martire said. “What message does that send to the kids? It creates a lot of unintended and hard-to-anticipate issues.”
Martire argues the district should have used the money to pay for one-time costs, such as critical building repairs. The district might have to delay such repairs in response to budget challenges, Martinez said at a recent event about the district’s Latino students.
Martinez told Chalkbeat he is proud of the choices the district made in spending federal COVID money, pointing to the recent research around student growth in Chicago and crediting the “amazing work” of principals, teachers, and students.
“What the evidence is telling me right now is that we used the resources in a way that our students are doing even better today than they were prior to me coming here,” he said.
Officials have vowed to push state lawmakers to give the district more money. The state has increased the district’s funding by about $1 billion since Illinois overhauled its funding formula in 2017. But the state’s formula, which aims to allocate new money to districts based on need, indicates CPS would still need $1.1 billion to be considered adequately funded.
State lawmakers typically finalize a budget in late May or early June. The Chicago Board of Education usually votes on the district’s overall budget in late June. CPS is planning to fund schools differently this year, using a formula that allocates staff positions and prioritizes student and community needs instead of doling out a set number of dollars per student.
Two principals said they’ll be able to keep some of the extra programming, such as Tutor Corps, because they oversee high-needs schools. But even that will come with some changes: The tutors will use a different, less expensive curriculum, they said.
The administrator who launched more after-school programs said losing the federal COVID money could limit what a school can do. Instead of hosting programs for most of the school year, for example, her former school may have to go back to 10 or 20 weeks out of the year.
“The altruistic ones of us wish the lesson will be learned that extra money really makes a difference, and the city and state will keep providing additional funds for these sorts of investments,” said one principal. “But I am imagining that we are going to be trimming to be leaner schools with less programming.”
Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.