Schools cut learning-recovery programs as NC students remain behind

For the past few years, North Carolina’s public schools have benefited from billions of dollars in federal funding to help adapt to disruption caused by a global pandemic and the aftereffects on student performance.

The $6.2 billion infusion — which accounted for about 10% of district budgets during that time — helped school systems stock up on computers, hire tutors and create programs to help students catch up to grade-level expectations after falling behind during the learn-from-home lockdowns that became a hallmark of the Covid-19 era.

At least 97% of the stimulus money has been spent or earmarked, including roughly $1 billion for learning recovery. But now the spigot is closed; the funds had to be used or committed by Sept. 30.

Schools are now adjusting to life after Covid funding — trying to figure out ways to tackle learning loss but without the funds they saw as crucial to getting students back on track.

“I don’t know that we could have caught up as quickly if we wouldn’t have had the extra supplemental stuff,” said Jay Toland, associate superintendent of business operations for Cumberland County Schools, who said intensive tutoring and expanded access to technology with helping students make up ground.

The largest chunk of federal Covid relief funding went toward supplies, learning recovery and staff compensation. It yielded new hires, recruitment and retention bonuses and extra pay for those who took on extra work. Higher-need schools received greater shares of the pandemic funds, meaning they’ll be hit the hardest by the drop-off.

To keep programs such as intensive tutoring, some schools are cutting services and reassigning employees to other tasks. In others, principals are reassigning teachers to take on more intervention tasks.

But many learning recovery programs have evaporated, jeopardizing the continuation of academic gains. Students and parents are likely to see less in-school support staff such as non-certified tutors or intervention teachers, school administrators say.

“When you’re facing a fiscal cliff of this magnitude, you have to make trade-offs,” said Rachel Wright Junio, director of the state Department of Public Instruction’s Office of Learning Recovery.

WRAL News surveyed more than a dozen school systems about how they’re navigating the loss in funding. Administrators reported cutting hundreds of intervention teachers, learning coaches, counselors, social workers and substitute teachers. They’re scaling back or eliminating tutoring and summer school programs — despite school officials’ beliefs that the personnel and new services have likely worked to speed up the pace of student learning.

Knowing that the money wouldn’t last forever, they had already planned to make these cuts, they said, although some have tried in the past year to figure out how to keep around services they began to see as essential.

In Wake County, at least 200 intervention teachers are being cut, along with dozens more teachers, intervention coordinators and other instructional staff. Dozens of similar positions are being cut in Durham, Person, Granville, Cumberland, Sampson, Robeson and Wilson counties.

Counselors, nurses, truancy officers and teaching assistants are also being let go across a number of school systems.

Tutoring programs will be reduced or eliminated in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, as well as systems in Durham, Cumberland, Person, Vance and Sampson counties. Summer learning will be reduced in some of those counties.

A DPI survey of public school systems and charter schools showed that most planned to keep at least something in some form – namely, tutoring, summer learning, universal screening for academic struggles, new curriculum and staff training. Most don’t plan to keep new full-time staff.

“Our intervention teachers are a real backbone in the building,” said Jasmine Barcelona, a Wake County literacy coach. “They’re having conversations with the teachers about the students’ growth. And so that carries over into the core, when you have another certified teacher brainstorming about a student’s needs, and then that conversation can help the teacher address needs throughout the whole day.”

She said her school will now need parental and community support. Volunteers can help work with students and can get training to do so through varying community programs. “I feel like we’re going to have to use all of the flexibility and creativity we can muster,” Barcelona said.

‘Tough choices’

The cuts are happening after two years of standardized test scores showing a bounce-back from a pandemic-era drop.

About 62% of North Carolina’s public school students are passing reading tests now, up two percentage points from the pandemic, though still down from 65% before the pandemic.

About 65% of students are passing math tests, up 5 percentage points from the pandemic and mirroring pre-pandemic scores on several tests.

Fifth-grade science scores have rebounded, but eighth-grade science and biology passage rates are still down a few percentage points. About three-quarters of fifth- and eighth-grade students pass science exams, and 62% passed biology this spring.

High school English II has fully rebounded, with 71% of students passing this spring, up two percentage points from before the pandemic.

Intervention teachers helped Latanja Dunkins’s fourth-grade daughter get to grade-level in reading in Wake County. They’ve reassumed roles as instructional coaches this year.

She said intervention teachers are crucial because they enable more one-on-one instruction in a district that has large classes. “It’s almost impossible for teachers to support over 20 students,” Dunkins said.

Dunkins herself is an elementary school teacher and used to have students come into her class to read to special needs children. They haven’t done that since the Covid-19 pandemic began because not enough students are reading well enough to do the extra task.

Learning recovery measures funded by the federal stimulus were largely focused on hiring temporary staff intended to stick around for about three years. With ongoing teacher shortages, those hires often turned into repurposed teaching positions and the hiring of substitute teachers to keep permanent teachers from having to cover additional classes and keep them focused on their own students. But they ultimately totaled hundreds of new teaching positions across the state.

Wake, Orange, Person and several other systems are holding onto behavioral health professionals. Others are angling to keep truancy officers and academic coaches.

“Districts have had to make some tough decisions” ahead of this school year, said Rhonda Schuhler, Franklin County Schools superintendent.

Schuhler wanted to keep intervention teachers and longevity bonuses for teachers — a new supplement that rewarded teachers the longer they had stayed employed in the school system. School leaders believed longevity pay had worked to keep teachers working there.

So the school board shifted 11 librarian positions into intervention teacher positions and staffed libraries with lower-cost media assistants. The board asked the county to continue to fund the longevity payments, and county commissioners agreed to provide the funding.

“Most districts are interested in either sustaining their high dosage tutoring programs or their summer learning programs,” said Wright Junio of the state Department of Public Instruction. To keep certain programs, the department is advising school systems to analyze student outcomes in connection with programs and see what worked better than other endeavors. Then, they should see if they can combine extra dollars from several existing funding sources to pay for the programs they want to keep.

Wright Junio thinks districts will ultimately make decisions that best help their students. “That might mean that they end up cutting something that’s existed in the district for a long period of time in order to keep a summer program, or in order to continue their high-dosage tutoring,” she said.

Some districts have figured that out for some programs with minimal cutting of other activities.

Some haven’t, Wright Junio said.

“Some districts have indicated as well that they would not be able to continue the programs,” Wright Junio said. “They had not found a good way to sustain programming.”

Schools are able to keep some programming if it qualifies under other existing funding sources.

The biggest one: federal Title I, a program that provides additional dollars to help schools with higher concentrations of lower-income children. The money is intended to boost services for students struggling academically or in other ways. Title I funding has topped $500 million in North Carolina in recent years, and schools use it in part to pay for teachers and remedial and supplemental services, including services outside of the regular school day.

But Title I isn’t a new funding source, so using it to fund a learning recovery program would require schools to cut some other service Title I previously covered.

Some school systems are making room to keep these new programs but cutting vacant positions or freezing positions after people leave, said Toland, the Cumberland County administrator. A district may outsource some services, like custodial work, to a vendor.

“Really it’s been more about cutting positions,” Toland said.

Staffing shortages make that work simpler.

“We’re really still up against a tough labor market,” said Toland, who is also a board member at the North Carolina Association of School Administrators.

“‘I’m going to have to live without this position, because I’m not going to be able to fill it,’” Toland said, describing the thinking of school leaders in the absence of cash from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund. “‘So I’m just going to go ahead and automatically put that money back into this high-dosage tutoring that I was doing with my ESSER funds.’”

Figuring out what works

Throughout the learning recovery process, students haven’t been required to spend more time in school. Instead, schools are trying to reach them during the school day with intensive tutoring or offering optional afterschool or summer programming, sometimes with accompanying transportation.

Tracking what programs work best is tricky. With the exception of summer programs, researchers can’t easily isolate groups of students or certain interventions to see how big of a difference just one program made. A student may have received new intensive tutoring at the same time their teacher was receiving new curriculum coaching.

North Carolina students are learning more -- and faster. With budget cuts looming, can it last?

The North Carolina Research Collaboratory is examining the effectiveness of certain programs as a part of a larger research project on federal pandemic relief.

Initial analyses and anecdotes suggest that summer programs can boost attendance during the regular school year and help students build social skills, school leaders and education researchers say. Academic gains from summer programs are modest because the programs are short, Wright Junio said.

Intensive tutoring has for years shown promise, although recent research suggests how a tutoring program is implemented matters toward ensuring its success.

The state-level research will be more helpful for school systems that school systems’ own research, Schuhler said, because districts tried different things in different ways and they can learn from one another.

That evaluation has “been absolutely a necessity in light of the fact that we’re going to be doing more with less going forward,” she said.

Several months before the federal stimulus dollars were set to disappear, the state Department of Public Instruction formed a “return on investment” guidance sheet for schools to evaluate whether something was worth keeping around, along with advice on how they can legally rearrange state, federal and local dollars to keep at least some of it around.

Toland is worried about what rural counties are going to do if they want to keep certain programs but don’t have the funding to.

“They can’t tax their constituents because the money may not be there, right?” he said. “Especially if they’d not have a lot of commercial industry and things like that.”

Cumberland County contributes significant local funding toward schools, he said. That’s just about 15% of local funding but, at $83 million, is a relatively high amount, compared to the county’s tax base, according to the Public School Forum of North Carolina. “So it is not wise of us to go on to ask them for a bunch of money.”

Planning for a funding cliff

North Carolina school leaders gathered over the summer to discuss ways they could still keep doing the work that hundreds of millions of dollars will no longer fund.

Some talked about starting learning recovery programs for the first time, such as intensive tutoring, after rehearing about others’ success. If they started them now, they’d be doing so without the benefit of the federal funds.

There’s a lot that those funds paid for.

Superintendent Catherine Truitt shouted out just a few.

Summer Bridge for science, technology, engineering and math enrichment in Brunswick County Schools.

Lenoir County Schools hired retired teachers to tutor students.

Union County Schools started high-dosage tutoring — one of many to do so — and hired a consultant to study how well it worked. The results are promising so far.

Durham Public Schools improved its teacher pipeline.

Johnston County created the Evening Academy for high school students.

“We knew eventually that the funding would sunset,” Truitt said. “But from the beginning, we stressed the importance of acting with sustainability in mind, to limit the number of salaries paid out” from the federal dollars.

North Carolina has been praised on that part, reporting fewer people hired with the temporary federal money than in other states, according to a 2023 analysis by FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

It’s easy to decide not to spend the $6.2 billion on permanent staff — or staff at all — knowing the money won’t last, Toland said. But it’s not practical to make that decision.

“But we’re in a people-intensive industry, right?” Toland said. “That’s how we work with students, is with people.”

State data through Aug. 31 show more than $477 million of the temporary federal money has paid for additional teachers and instructional support, not including benefits. More than $125 million has gone toward tutoring, $89 million toward teaching assistants and $66 million paid for instructional facilitators, who work on curriculum and coach teachers. More than $270 million has gone toward paying employees to take on extra work, including expanded summer school programs. More than $400 million has gone toward contract workers, not specified by what role they may or may not play in learning recovery.

“The biggest challenge we can all relate to is people,”John Tyson, chief of school performance for Union County Public Schools, told the summer convention of school leaders.

The Union County school system undertook its own high-impact tutoring program for a select number of low-performing schools and worked with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers to study whether it worked.

Researchers are waiting for a bit more data first, said Douglas Lauen, a professor of public policy and sociology at UNC.

“But of course you don’t have time to wait; you need an answer now,” he said.

The Union system got creative, needing to hire people to do the tutoring, Tyson said.

So they brought in high school calculus students during their open periods. They earned $18 per hour. Non-high school students earned $25 per hour.

Officials with other school systems, largely rural ones, asked Tyson for advice later during the conference, some saying they wanted to start their own tutoring programs or had only just started them, even as the federal dollars were disappearing.

But Tyson cautioned the crowd.

“Don’t ask me how we’re going to continue,” he said. “We’re still working on it.”

NC schools got more than $6.2B in pandemic relief dollars. What did they spend them on?

Some of the biggest expenses happened early on the distribution of those dollars, often to support remote learning, then a return to spaced out and sterilized classrooms, and to recruit and retain staff amid shortages.

Some of the biggest expenses, as of Aug. 31:

• $1.3 billion on supplies and materials, just over half of which went toward technology: $460.7 million for computer equipment, $203.8 million for computer software and supplies
• $1.2 billion toward bonus pay, which was used to fund recruitment and retention bonuses for staff amid concerns about shortages. About two-thirds of that ($816.4 million) was spent in just one year — the 2021-22 school year, the first year returning to full-time in-person learning and when schools had lost many staff to other jobs during school closures. Shortages remain in many positions, including bus drivers and teachers.
• $676.8 million on capital costs, including $353.2 million on HVAC contracts and $42.4 million on computer hardware
• $639.2 million toward contracts, including workers to provide maintenance and repairs and workers to provide certain student services, such as transportation or psychological or speech-language pathology services
• $567 million toward benefits for newly hired or extended employees
• $477.8 million for new teachers and instructional support: $271.7 million has gone toward additional certified teachers, and another $52.4 million toward non-certified teachers. Another $135 million went toward instructional support and teacher mentors.
• $270.2 million toward pay for employees taking on extra work, including $166.9 million toward extended contracts for things like summer school and $100 million toward stipends for taking on extra work
• $148.2 million for various other staff, including cafeteria workers and custodians
• $124.5 million toward tutor pay, including $55 million for tutoring during the school day and $69.5 million for other tutoring
• $100.9 million toward supplemental pay for employees
• $89.4 million toward teaching assistants
• $65.8 million for instructional facilitators, who work on curriculum and coach teachers
• $45 million for additional administrators
• $32.1 million for substitute teachers
• $27.4 million for staff development

Part of this funding was approved by state lawmakers and not just by school systems and school boards.

For example, state lawmakers have approved the use of $100 million in federal pandemic dollars on one-time bonuses for teachers and more than $50 million on training for the state’s new approach to teaching elementary-grades reading.