ESSER-ting Preferences: Examining School District Preferences for Using Federal Pandemic Relief Fundings

We analyzed the proposed spending data for the American Recovery Plan’s Elementary and Secondary Emergency Relief III (ESSER III) fund from the spring of 2021 of nearly 3,000 traditional public-school districts in the United States to (1) identify trends in the strategies adopted and (2) to test whether spending strategies were observably heterogeneous across district characteristics. We found that districts proposed a breadth of spending patterns with ESSER III. Moreover, there was a clear prioritization on spending related to academic learning recovery and facilities and operations spending, with the latter being particularly emphasized in higher-poverty districts. This divergent spending pattern may have important equity implications for short-term academic learning recovery for students affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.