Portage County Schools Receive Federal Covid-19 Relief Funding, Where is the Money Going?

This year congress sent billions of dollars to schools across America in hopes to provide relief to schools in need. The CARES Act provided schools in Ohio just over $650 million dollars in federal aid this year. Portage County schools were given about $6.5 million dollars according to the Ohio Department of Education. Schools received funding based on the “level and concentration of poverty” in a given district according to Aaron Rausch, Director of the Office of Budget and School Funding at the Ohio Department of Education. How much each school in Ohio received was detailed by the Ohio Department of Education and you can find that information here. The graph below shows how the funds were split up between all the schools in Portage County.  

There have been reports of schools in other states using some of the funds to support their schools’ athletic programs. Rausch says the funds have a wide array of uses and it is up to the district to decide what to use it on, but it is designed for educational improvement.

“The funds specifically are to prepare, prevent, and respond to Covid-19. Within that there are a lot of allowable uses that those funds can be attached to. It really is up to each local district to make the determinations about how they are going to leverage these federal resources to safely and effectively reopen schools and to ensure a safe learning environment for students.”

He goes on to say that schools are required to address learning loss in some way with these funds.

“Schools are also focused on learning recovery. The report card we just released a few weeks ago confirms that students struggled in a fully remote or hybrid learning environment since last March. So the federal government has actually some of these dollars have to be used to address learning loss and learning recovery.”

Kent City Schools received just under $9 million dollars in federal funding, second most in portage county trailing only Ravenna City Schools at around $9.6 million dollars in relief funds. According to Debbie Krutz, Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer at Kent City Schools, they are being “good stewards” of these funds and are not using them towards athletics in the district. The district did recently install a new turf athletic field at their stadium, but she says that was funded entirely by local taxpayer dollars.

The athletic department is not getting any of the government aid directly, but Kent is making use of the money with a plethora of improvements to the district itself. Krutz says the only thing the athletic department got because of the funding were thermometers, but they were also used within the classrooms.

“So for example we purchased 450 Chromebooks, sanitation supplies, digital thermometers for classrooms and sports teams. So we did buy some digital thermometers for sports teams, but it wasn’t used for athletic programs.”

She also says some of the funds went towards additional furniture in the buildings, protective equipment like masks and disinfectant, the leasing of tents for outdoor classes, and personnel costs for long term substitute teachers. In the future Krutz says heating, ventilation, and air conditioning is the main focus in all buildings.

“Every classroom has its own uninvent system and so it became clear that we needed to pull out and totally replace each of those uni-vent systems, which were currently being used for heating. But with the upgrade and the approval of our taxpayers, they are also going to be used for air conditioning. And with new uni-vents it brought in more outside air, and we installed bipolar ionization units, BPI units, were installed in each of those uni-vents and that cleans the air and removes airborne particles.”

The CARES act was designed specifically for schools to improve the quality of the learning process and prevent the spread of Covid-19. Kent City Schools seems to be doing just that all the while avoiding allocating funds where it might not have been intended, like the school’s athletic department.