Southwest Illinois schools prepare for class with COVID-19. How will they pay for it?
The coronavirus pandemic is expected to add millions of dollars in unplanned expenses in school districts across southwestern Illinois this fall, according to administrators who don’t know how they’re going to pay for them.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker shut down schools in March. In April, he ordered schools to stay closed through the end of the year, forcing educators to adapt quickly to e-learning.
The fall will pose new challenges. Districts will likely have to confront pandemic-related expenses — which one local administrator estimates could top $4 million — with less revenue than they have budgeted.
“As revenues decline, so does funding,” Belleville 201 Superintendent Brian Mentzer said. “They’re giving us the expectation that those revenues are going to be down.”
Meanwhile, districts are preparing for new expenditures, including personal protection equipment, technology for remote learning, and training for staff to help them and students adjust to the new normal.
School officials in East St. Louis District 189 are preparing for upwards of $4 million in unplanned expenses related to the safety and educational challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Emergency funding through the federal Coronavirus Aid Relief Act will help them cover most of those costs because of the district’s high percentage of low-income families — more than 93% of students in the district qualify as low-income.
But eight local districts will receive less than $20,000, and four of those will get no money at all, according to projections from the Illinois State Board of Education.
“We can’t wait to procure face shields, plexiglass, partitions for desks — the world’s appetite for those things has made it so we have to make decisions early for that,” Mentzer said.
His district, which includes Belleville East and West, is projected to receive more than $914,000, which on a scale with East St. Louis is less than a quarter of what it could cost to protect students from coronavirus in accordance with Centers for Disease Control guidelines.
State guidance for the fall was released in June, and districts are starting to pull together final plans. As they do, the initial costs of educating students in a pandemic are starting to emerge.
New costs
East St. Louis 189 has more than 5,700 students, making it the largest in St. Clair County. It also has among the largest percentage of low-income families in the region, according to the Illinois school report card.
The district is projected to receive $6.1 million through the CARES Act, which is the most of any district in the metro-east, and the sixth most in the state.
Collinsville 10, the second-largest district in the area with 6,350 students, is projected to receive just over $1.6 million, though Superintendent Brad Skertich said administration is budgeting to spend $1.2 million. The rest is “sitting in limbo,” he said, while it figures out how much will go to parochial schools.
District 189 Chief Financial Officer Sherry Whitaker detailed nearly $6 million in estimated costs to prepare East St. Louis for its return to learn plan in the fall.
“We’ve had to make that leap pretty quickly,” she said. “For us, though we’ve had some Chromebooks that we were able to give to our kiddos in the short period of time that we had, we know that there’s going to be a need for us and our district for about 2,000 more of those.”
To do e-learning properly, Whitaker said it could cost the district well above $2 million just for devices. New expenses would include: $1 million for Chromebooks for students, at least $500,000 for 1,000 to 1,500 WiFi hotspots and between $300,000 and $400,000 for printers and laptops for teachers. Whitaker met with administrators and staff in technology and curriculum to estimate how many devices are needed.
Collinsville purchased $1 million worth of chromebooks so the district will have one device for every student. Skertich said they already had between 200 and 300 WiFi hotspots throughout the district, and were building an internet tower to cover a five-mile radius around Kreitner Elementary. The project is expected to come in at less than $225,000.
For extra sterile cleaning equipment, PPE and modifications to facilities, like plexiglass dividers in offices, Whitaker estimated the district would spend another $800,000.
Many students, especially those who are homeless, are going to require extra support, Whitaker said.
Staff training for mental and physical health, including at-risk needs, will cost about $300,000. Training to make sure teachers are prepared to handle the technology used for remote learning could be another $1 million. To address curriculum, training and parent engagement she estimated a cost of $800,000.
“This is new to (parents), too,” Whitaker said, citing the need for parent engagement. “It’s really all of us that are involved in this.”
With $100,000 being spent in Collinsville on masks, signage, plexiglass barriers and other protective materials, there’s not as much money left to to focus on supports for at-risk students and socio-emotional health, though Skertich said those are the next priorities.
“If we do get to a situation where more funding comes, we’re going to push to have more resources in those areas,” he said.
To help manage younger students, District 189 plans to hire 15 to 20 additional support staff to ensure coronavirus guidance involving face masks and social distancing is followed. In 2020, all classroom aides made between $24,360 and $41,841, according to data from the Illinois State Board of Education.
If pay for aides remains consistent, the new staff could cost anywhere between $365,400 and $836,820.
“With social distancing in the elementary grades, we’re going to need support to help us with social distancing,” Whitaker said. “If you tell a 7-year-old to keep their mask on, they’re going to take theirs off and yours.”
The cost of additional meals for students will cost $500,000, if the state doesn’t reimburse the district. Another $500,000 will be given to East St. Louis to give to non-public schools within the district.
Where will the money come from?
The bulk of school funding in Illinois comes from local property taxes, which account for about 66% of the total, followed by state aid, which averages 27% of funding for the more than 850 districts in the state. Gov. J.B. Pritzker has already warned that that the state funding is expected to fall short, but St. Clair County is cautiously optimistic about collecting local taxes.
In 2017, Illinois started an evidence-based funding formula for education to address inequities in funding. Schools were supposed to receive an increase of $350 million each year, with the goal of having all districts to 90% of adequate funding by 2027.
This year, K-12 schools will get level funding, the same as last year. Funding for 2022, though, is less certain.
“I think the biggest thing is going to be trying to determine the long-term repercussions of the economic situation right now,” Mentzer said. “Each of these things costs something.”
St. Clair County, like many local governments, pushed back collection due dates for tax bills to provide residents relief during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unemployment claims skyrocketed as businesses were forced to shut down. So far though, County Treasurer Andrew Lopinot said residents are still largely paying their taxes on time.
“Since we have been collecting, we’re finding that we’re collecting pretty much the same amount, if not a little bit better, than we were this time last year,” he said.
Almost 9% of the $394 million collected throughout the year has been paid.
“It’s hard to predict how the pandemic is going to impact people paying taxes,” Lopinot said. “We’re still cautious and optimistic about how the collection is going to continue going into the rest of the collection season.”
Property taxes depend on a home’s value. St. Clair County Assessor Jennifer Gomric-Minton said it’s too early to tell what the pandemic might mean for home prices in the long term, but that sale prices have been consistent so far.
The first distribution of local tax dollars will be more than usual, Lopinot said. “We’re giving them their funds sooner rather than opposed to later,” he said.
Lost federal funding?
The last major piece is federal funding, which covers about 8% of school budgets nationally. That can vary, though: Only 5% of Triad’s $34 million annual budget comes from federal funding, while that same funding accounts for 16% of East St. Louis’s $112 million budget. Most districts fall between the two.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump threatened to cut off federal funding to schools if they don’t reopen in the fall. In a series of tweets, he criticized the guidelines the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set for opening schools, saying the were very tough, expensive and impractical.
Trump did not say which funding would be cut or under what authority. Most federal funding to schools comes as Title 1 grants, which are based on the number of students in low-income families in the district, but schools are also expecting money from the CARES Act to bolster staff and facilities to reopen in the fall.
Collectively, Belleville 201 receives between $3.4 and $3.6 million of federal money, which includes national school lunch and breakfast money, special education money, Medicaid and Title 1 funds. The full operating budget is $72 million.
Mentzer said he didn’t have enough information to know what Trump’s statement means, but that the district was doing its best for everybody involved.
“I do feel like at the end of the day, we’ll do what’s best, what is right, and/or what we’re told to do,” he said.
