The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted students’ education for the past year and a half, but the impact has gone beyond lessons and classes. The pandemic has also disrupted school budgets—creating new expenses in some areas, cutting costs in others, and upending financial plans across the board.
The Harvard schools’ business manager, Ingrid Nilsson, presented a wrapup of the fiscal 2021 expenditures to the School Committee at its Monday meeting this week. The amount drawn from the town budget remained just under $14 million, as approved at the Fall Town Meeting last year.
But the schools regularly get a substantial share of their total budget from offsets—money from other sources besides the town’s property taxes. The full amount that the schools budgeted for fiscal 2021 was almost $17.3 million, well above the $14 million that came from the town. And the pandemic drove overall school expenditures to nearly $17.8 million, about $484,000 over the budgeted amount, according to Nilsson’s figures.
“The pandemic put a lot of pressure on the budget,” Nilsson said. What carried the schools through, she explained, was more than a million dollars in federal emergency relief funds that have been allocated for the Harvard schools—$1,054,787.50, to be exact. Of that, more than $379,000 was spent in fiscal 2021, leaving some $675,000 for use by fiscal 2024.
The bulk of that money is in so-called ESSER grants—Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief. The ESSER grants come in three phases, with spending deadlines ranging from 2022 to 2024. Under the terms of the ESSER program, the school district knows how much money has been allocated for it, but schools still have to spend the money and then apply for reimbursement from that total amount.
Other emergency sources of aid were the Coronavirus Relief Fund and the State Coronavirus Prevention Fund. And the town also covered about $133,000 of the schools’ costs related to the COVID-19 pandemic from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act funds it received.
Among the schools’ increased expenses have been the cost of additional substitute teachers, filling in for those who were either sick themselves or in quarantine after exposure to the coronavirus. Also needed were an additional custodian for extra cleaning, an additional school nurse, and a teacher to take on an extra remote class.
With ESSER money designated for student mental health, the schools added a teaching counselor for a two-year term. And federal funds were also applied to the cost of benefits for the added staff who were eligible—a cost that usually appears on the town side of the budget.
Then there were the equipment costs: plexiglass; outdoor tents for mask breaks and lunch when weather permitted; and extra desks to replace cafeteria tables, so that students could be safely spaced at lunch when weather forced them indoors. New air filters and repairs to Bromfield’s HVAC systems improved ventilation but added to costs. So did keeping windows open enough for some ventilation during the heating season. During the months when much learning was remote, the schools made sure each student had an iPad or laptop for home use, instead of relying on shared devices kept on the classroom carts.
Overall, offsets made up almost a fifth of the fiscal 2021 school budget. The largest source of offset money is the Devens fund, which is the money MassDevelopment has contracted to pay the Harvard schools to educate about 100 students who live in Devens. In fiscal 2021 the school budget included about $1.6 million from the Devens fund, although the schools did not spend that full amount.
The pandemic did not affect the money the Devens fund brought in, but some other offsets fell sharply. In a typical year, those other offsets would include money from the community education Bridges before- and after-school program, athletic fees, bus fees, and more. But fiscal 2021 was not a typical year. Income from Bridges was down about $267,000 in fiscal 2021, as compared to the last full pre-pandemic year of fiscal 2019. Similarly, athletic fees fell nearly $90,000. Losses from the decline in the full-day kindergarten program were about $133,000.
Nilsson noted that there were also a few pandemic-related savings. Some personnel costs were lower because the school year was shortened. And less was spent on classroom supplies, equipment, and new textbooks.
“It was a crazy year, but we made it,” Nilsson told the School Committee. “The MCAS results and the smiling kids we see every day made it worthwhile.”
