The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic demanded the Department of Education turn over records on the disbursement of COVID-19 emergency relief funds to schools in a Thursday letter.
The letter from subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona asked for an accounting of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds allocated by the COVID-19 relief packages. The letter noted the extensive learning loss brought by the pandemic, specifically citing recent reports that eighth grade students at LeBron James’s I Promise Academy had all failed to meet math proficiency standards.
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“Congress allocated more than $190 billion of aid since the beginning of the pandemic to enable schools to safely reopen and address pandemic-related learning loss,” Wenstrup wrote before noting that Congress had passed three bills in 2020 and 2021 to address the issue, including allocating $122 billion in the American Rescue Plan, which passed in early 2021.
“However, many critics—including concerned parents—have questioned the efficacy of the program and how much of these funds went toward helping students succeed in the classroom,” he continued. “This is especially concerning in light of mounting evidence that America’s students are continuing to fail academically and struggling to recover pandemic-related learning deficits.”
Wenstrup noted that because the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds were allocated with very few restrictions on how the money could be spent, several schools had used them for extravagant purchases such as athletic fields and “to indoctrinate children in core tenets of leftist ideology.”
The letter demands the department provide the committee with “recipient data collection forms” from 2020, 2021, and 2022 by Aug. 24.
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“It is critically important that Congress understand how the Department administered ESSER funds and the extent to which State Educational Agencies (SEAs) or Local Educational Agencies (LEAs) misused funds — at the expense of America’s students,” Wenstrup wrote. “The timely release of data collected by the Department … is crucial for ensuring that Congress can conduct sufficient accounting and make sure that American students’ academic shortcomings — as the result of the Biden Administration’s continued and unscientific school closures — are addressed.”
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