ESSER — Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief

Three acts, one fund. ESSER I under the CARES Act (March 2020), ESSER II under CRRSA (December 2020), and ESSER III under the American Rescue Plan (March 2021), each larger than the last. Distributed to districts in proportion to their Title I Part A shares, which means it arrived on a poverty formula and was therefore concentrated in exactly the districts Ohio’s own system leaves most dependent on a weak local base. verified

It expired. The last obligation deadline fell in September 2024. A district that used ESSER for recurring costs — staff, programs, interventions — faced the loss of that money with no state channel replacing it. This is the fiscal cliff that runs underneath every FY2025 and FY2026 forecast in district-finances.csv. verified

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

Not what Ohio publishes. Figures derived here from committed fixtures, each one citing the test that reproduces it.

The size of it, and why every cross-year comparison touches it # ↑ Contents

FY2022 is the peak. In that year Ohio districts took 13.87% of school revenue from federal sources against a national 13.24% — $2,466 per pupil against $2,493 — which places Ohio 25th of 51 and, unusually for this corpus, entirely unremarkable. verified crates/dispersion/src/census_states.rs

All four of those figures are the state-level F-33 table, and the citation used to name national_peers.rs, which is the district panel and computes none of them. The two sources are close and not equal — the district panel gives Ohio a 51.7% local share against this table’s 51.8%, and litigation/derolph-i-1997 publishes the 51.8% — so the wrong one was cited for figures that reproduce only from the right one. The table had no public reader when the citation was written; it does now.

The unremarkable federal share is what makes the rest of Ohio’s position remarkable. Ohio is seventh of fifty-one on local share and forty-fifth on state share; it is ordinary on federal share and ordinary on spending per pupil. The distinctive thing is the split between the two domestic levels, and the federal channel is a constant that does not explain it. inference

Federal money is compensatory in Ohio, monotonically, and it is small. Quartiling the 611 comparable districts by local revenue per pupil in FY2022: verified dispersion::national_peers::ohio_by_local_wealth, pinned by test

quartile   local/pupil   state/pupil   federal/pupil
Q1 poorest      $4,342        $8,970          $2,738
Q2              $6,678        $7,199          $2,231
Q3              $8,541        $6,232          $2,181
Q4 richest     $13,932        $4,522          $1,825

The local gap between the top and bottom quartile is $9,590 per pupil. State equalization closes $4,448 of it, 46%. The federal channel closes $913, or 9.5%. Together they leave $4,229 per pupil of the local gap standing. verified

Every cell above is a mean over the districts in its quartile, not over their pupils, and on enrolled ADM the federal channel’s share of the gap is the smaller number rather than the larger. The two readings and the rule for choosing between them are on Equity and in a district mean is not a state figure. inference

And FY2022 is the most favorable year that will ever be measured for this, because the federal column is at its ESSER peak. The offset shown here is an upper bound on a channel that has since contracted to its pre-pandemic level. Whatever the answer to “does the system equalize”, it is worse than these figures after September 2024. inference

How the cliff landed, on the fund the forecasts report # ↑ Contents

The join this node called for is run. The forecasts are six closed fiscal years of every district’s general fund, and the relief money is the federal column of the Census panel — and the first thing the two together establish is that they never touched. Across 607 districts, federal revenue went from $1.579bn in FY2019 to $3.776bn at the FY2022 peak, a rise of 139%; their general-fund revenue over the same span went $20.590bn to $20.565bn, which is a fall. verified crates/project

That is the control and not a limitation. Ohio districts received relief into special revenue funds, so a district that spent it on one-time costs leaves no general-fund trace at all. A district that spent it on recurring costs — staff, programs, interventions it meant to keep — has to carry them somewhere once the grant ends, and the general fund is the somewhere. So the recurring-cost reading makes a prediction: general-fund spending after the cliff should grow faster where the relief was larger.

It does not. Splitting the 607 on relief per pupil, the median district’s general-fund spending grew this much from FY2023 to FY2025:

quartile        relief per pupil   FY2023-FY2025 spending   change in cash,
                (FY2019 to peak)   growth, median           in years of spending
least relieved            $808              20.2%                   -0.113
2nd                     $1,108              19.5%                   -0.094
3rd                     $1,496              24.6%                   -0.114
most relieved           $2,322              19.3%                   -0.097

The most exposed quartile received nearly three times what the least did and grew the slowest of the four. The correlation between relief per pupil and later spending growth is 0.0274. The cash drawdown is the same tenth of a year of spending in every quartile, and it is shallower in the most exposed one. verified

Ohio’s districts did not, as a population, move relief-funded costs onto the general fund in proportion to what they received. The 20% common growth is the Fair School Funding Plan’s phase-in arriving in the same years, and it arrives everywhere. inference

What the instrument cannot do is name the districts. Only 27 of 607 are spending less in FY2025 than in FY2023 — hardly any district is cutting in nominal terms — and those 27 are spread across all four exposure quartiles rather than concentrated in the exposed one. A district-by-district answer needs the special revenue funds, which the five-year forecast does not report and no source here carries. open

One partial instrument has since been built and it does not close that. The filings’ transfers line — total_revenue_and_sources less total_revenue — is the route relief money took into the general fund where it took one, and it is per district and per year. It doubles across the relief years and falls back when the grants end, and what a district moved through it bears only weakly on what that district received: see general fund cash balance. It says how much reached the general fund and still says nothing about what was bought with the rest. verified crates/project