The U.S. Department of Education’s sudden termination of COVID-era relief funds endangers $34 million across more than a dozen school districts that have already obligated the funds for ongoing projects, according to a letter Kentucky Education Commissioner Robbie Fletcher sent superintendents on Tuesday.
Last Friday the Kentucky Department of Education received a letter from recently-appointed Secretary Linda McMahon. The state originally sought and was granted an extended period over which to spend millions in COVID relief dollars until March 28, 2026. But with no warning, McMahon cancelled that extension — the millions in relief funds that the state and districts had failed to spend were gone.
According to an internal spreadsheet obtained by The 74, Kentucky has more than $67 million in remaining Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund dollars as of March 6 that have now been cancelled. Nationally, the total is close to $3 billion.
Owsley County School District Superintendent James Cornett II said without federal COVID-19 emergency relief funds, needed renovations on school buildings would’ve been impossible. The small eastern Kentucky district was in the final leg of a project to renovate bathrooms for about 700 students. They had just $340,000 left to pay out, scheduled for Monday, March 31.
“About a year ago, we had filed and got the extension like everybody else had,” Cornett said. “Literally our last drawdown would have been on March 31 and we would be completed with the ESSER money.”
Cornett told Kentucky Public Radio he found out over the weekend that the “money’s not there,” leaving the district to scramble to cover its obligations.
“Because $340,000 to a district our size, it'll devastate us,” Cornett said.
The U.S. Department of Education left the door open to considering extensions on a case-by-case basis, and Cornett said he’s working actively with federal lawmakers and the department to figure out next steps.
According to Fletcher, the decision will hurt districts and schools across the state who already committed or spent funds based on the promised extension. Fletcher said 13 districts currently have $34 million they have yet to spend from COVID relief funds. He said much of those funds are for projects that take a long time to complete, like new construction or school bus purchases.
Some districts are nearly done expending their funds, while others would be losing out on a significant amount, like southeastern Laurel County, which still had $10 million remaining in outstanding COVID-era relief funds, or western Christian County that had less than an $8 million balance.
“Because [the U.S. Department of Education] required that grant funds subject to the extended liquidation deadline be obligated before Sept. 30, 2024, USED’s action to shorten the liquidation period by a full year leaves our districts and KDE in a difficult position,” Fletcher wrote.
The Kentucky education department also has some outstanding funds, including $4.3 million to update educational technology services. That would have partially paid for a multi-million dollar cyber defense project to deal with a rapid increase in cyberattacks. The funding loss would also affect summer and school-year programs to tackle learning loss, literacy instruction training for elementary school teachers and a new online registration service, Fletcher said.
He said the department will ask McMahon to reconsider her letter. Fletcher also asked superintendents to contact the state’s federal delegation and McMahon.
“By taking immediate action and voicing your concerns, we can work together to ensure that our schools and districts receive the support they need to continue providing quality education to all students,” Fletcher wrote.
In northeastern Carter County School District, Superintendent Paul Green said the sudden deadline would make his district lose out on $4.16 million in federal funding. Those funds were dedicated to building a new high school building that would consolidate the district's two high schools and its career and technical center into one building. Green said they’ve already spent $9 million of the funds on site development.
Green said the district moved as quickly as it could to make the project a reality, but construction is a necessarily lengthy process.
“We couldn't help [the timeline] just because of, quite frankly, bureaucracies that often were federal bureaucracies — things like permitting and that type of thing,” Green said. “It was the federal government itself that caused us the delays, that prevented us from spending the money in a timely fashion.”
He said the new building would benefit the roughly 1,200 high school students in Carter County and generations to come as they work to replace buildings that are more than half a century old. He said the project will go on regardless.
“If we lose those funds, then it just significantly impacts what we're able to construct,” Green said. “We're either gonna have to find additional funds from somewhere else, or our kids are just not gonna have as nice a facility.”
State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
