MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Alabama State Superintendent Eric Mackey told members of the State Board of Education Thursday to brace themselves for a significant number of school program and position cuts in the coming years as a multi-billion dollar pool of federal pandemic relief dollars is set to expire.
Those funds, which totaled $190 billion, were allocated toward school districts across the country through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief program, known as ESSER, a component of the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act.
“As I’ve mentioned over and over again, we are losing a couple of billion dollars in ESSER funds in September, and a lot of programs are going to go away,” Mackey said during the board meeting at the Gordon Persons Building.
“Now I don’t want to choose the programs, I would suspect local school boards don’t want to choose the programs either, but there are programs that are going away, there are positions that are going to go away, and that’s just a matter of there (being) a lot less money for the 2024-2025 school year.”
Some school districts have already begun cutting major programs, such as in Chilton County, which last week announced that it would not be continuing its free after-school program, which at $2.5 million, was funded entirely by ESSER funds.
Some districts have also begun cutting school positions, Mackey said, including teachers, who in many cases were offered different positions but ultimately declined.
Ultimately, the significant federal funding Alabama schools have received over the last several years, Mackey said, had led to a hiring spree that was unsustainable for the Education Department and local school districts.
“Right now we have about 3,000 more employees in public schools than we had in 2019, 2020,” he said.
“The population of children has been declining, we’ve got about 20,000 fewer kids; well, that’s not sustainable long term. So I know that’s going to normalize, and that number of employees, as the federal money goes away, is going to come down. It’s just the way it is.”
School leaders have previously been warned by legislative budget leaders that the state would not pick up the slack for personnel and recurring expenses when federal COVID funds run out.
While Mackey said “many” school districts already started making cuts to both programs and positions, he urged school districts to not drag their feet in making those decisions, and warned that doing so could result in severe budgetary consequences.
“I know I’ve been talking about this for four years that the day was coming, but it’s here,” he said.
“I feel hard for local school boards, it’s going to be really hard to make those cuts, but the boards that don’t make those cuts, three or four years from now are going to be looking at state intervention because they’re going to run out of money. They’ve got to do that, unless they can raise local tax or something like that to bridge the gap.”
The wave of school program and position cuts was not isolated to this year either, Mackey said. While there was less money at schools’ disposal this year when compared to last year, subsequent years would see progressively less and less money.
“There’s going to be less money to spend this year, there’s going to be even less money to spend the next year, and there’s going to be much less money to spend the third year,” he said.
Some school districts will be able to better “soft land the cuts” Mackey said, given that the large pool of federal pandemic relief funds, which expire in September, could be used ahead of the deadline for service contracts that extend for multi-year periods.
“Just know, this is going to be an issue over and over,” he continued. “All the stories are not going to play out in the press, but there are going to be programs cut because there is going to be a lot less money.”