SNOW HILL– County staff told the Worcester County Commissioners this week that the school system has more than $9 million in federal grant funding remaining.
The commissioners this week reviewed the federal funding the school system has received and how the programs and positions paid for with that funding could impact the operating budget going forward.
“As we work through the data we will continue to focus on how or if the other grants will impact the operating budget in the future,” said Candace Savage, the county’s deputy chief administrative officer.
In the wake of the pandemic, Maryland received more than $3.2 billion in Coronavirus Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund dollars. While the local share of ESSER funds and what they were being used for was a source of contention during the county’s recent budget process, Savage told the commissioners this week that she was now reviewing specifics regarding the grants. She said that as part of the Public Information Act request the county had submitted, Worcester County Public Schools had provided more than 270 pages of documents related to ESSER grants.
“We’re still working through a lot of that data but we just wanted to give a brief update,” Savage said. “Overall the board of education received 22.4 million in ESSER relief funding.”
She said that when the information was provided in the beginning of June, the school system had about $9.5 million of the $22.4 million remaining. She said there were three ESSER allocations to the county and that the most recent one was the largest at about $14.4 million. About $5 million of that has been spent.
“Approximately $1.4 million, or 28%, has been spent on personnel, which includes additional staff, summer and afterschool programs, and transportation,” she said. “One million, or 20%, has been spent on Apple products and services. This includes an annual lease of $121,000.”
She said some of the ESSER expenditures could carry over into the school system’s operating budget once the grant funding was gone. She said that when she received the information, there was about $1.7 million that could carry over, as that funding had been used to hire staff and fund technology leases. Since then, the school system has opted to accept a $600,000 early childhood education grant to expand the number of PreK3 classrooms in the county’s public schools.
“If the board of education decides to continue to fund these programs at $1.7 million as well as the PreK expansion program at $600,000, future operating budgets could start with a shortfall of $2.3 million just based off these two grants,” Savage said.
Commissioner Caryn Abbott asked about the school system’s Maryland LEADS funding, as a reduction in the matching funds associated with that grant had been included on the school system’s list of necessary budget reductions when a maintenance of effort budget was approved by the commissioners.
Savage said she initially had trouble locating that funding within the financial documents the school system provided.
“However within the Public Information Act request I was able to find that is a budget line within their salaries… and is budgeted for $450,000,” she said. “That is not on their general ledger accounting lines so we need some clarification on how that works.”
In an interview following the presentation, Annette Wallace, the school system’s chief safety and academic officer for grades 9-12, said the ESSER funding was meant to help students post-pandemic.
“The purpose of ESSER was big boosters back into the school system because we knew kids were going to have more health problems, more learning loss, and all those things compounded,” she said.
Wallace said the school system didn’t intend to allow most of the expenditures to become part of the operating budget.
“We’ve tried to open the lines of communication and we’re continuing to try to work on that from our side as well as from their side,” she said. “We’ve tried to provide clarity around the only thing that we could potentially be coming back for and asking them would be is if we decided to renew the lease for our MacBooks.”
She acknowledged, however, that PreK3 could also be discussed.
“We believe in early childhood education and we know it will pay dividends,” she said. “I think it’s important for the community to remember that these kids were born during the pandemic. These were the kids born in 2020. These are pandemic babies who are facing more challenges than any kids we’ve had yet in our schools.”
She said the PreK3 expansion could be addressed if the commissioners didn’t support it in the next budget request.
“… then we will make some very difficult decisions in our school system because we’re pretty committed to believing in all the research and knowledge and skillsets we have in knowing how important PreK3 is,” she said. “We hope they would reconsider that.”
