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NEW BEDFORD — The once-in-a-generation pot of COVID-relief dollars that landed in New Bedford’s schools — all $74 million of it — will soon be gone. Administrators are outwardly confident they can spend or encumber all the money before this month’s Sept. 30 deadline, but some projects have not yet completed the public bidding stage. This includes a $4.4 million school-based health center, for which the district is still awaiting public bids.
Now, New Bedford is in a 20-day race in which administrators cannot afford any misstep, snag, or delay — otherwise they’ll have to return the unspent money.
At Monday’s meeting of the School Committee, the approaching ESSER (the name of the federal COVID-relief education grants) deadline nearly went unremarked. For more than two years, progress on ESSER spending has been part of every single finance report presented to the School Committee. At the August meeting, officials reported more than $50 million had been spent so far across the grant’s three installments. But this month, there was no designated slide for tracking the spending.
“Do you have any update on facilities?” asked Mayor Jon Mitchell at the conclusion of the monthly finance report. The large majority of New Bedford’s ESSER dollars have so far been directed toward facilities and capital improvements — which Superintendent Andrew O’Leary has described as “using one-time funds for one-time costs.” Many other districts that used the money to hire more teachers are now facing a fiscal cliff.
Mitchell, as chair of the School Committee, has approved of this strategy and has closely followed the COVID-money projects, including: a new central kitchen facility, a new school-based health center, HVAC updates around the district, and accessibility improvements in elementary schools.
Dr. Barry Rabinovitch, who delivered the finance report, answered as Mitchell asked individually about each of these projects.
Construction at the central kitchen facility is underway and still on track for a January opening, Rabinovitch said; window and door replacements have mostly been completed; and accessibility projects are well underway.
The school-based health center, however, is still out for public bidding by contractors, Rabinovitch said. The deadline for these bids is Sept. 19, less than two weeks before the deadline to “encumber” the COVID funds (that is, to designate spending with a contract).
Mitchell commented, “That’s a narrow window!”
Another district administrator has since confirmed to The Light that one other project, the $5 million HVAC improvements at Gomes Elementary, is still out for public bids. By mid-September the district needs all bids to be returned, then must award the contracts that encumber the funds before Sept. 30.
Rabinovitch and other administrators have said there has already been interest from multiple contractors for the health center project, so the district expects to be able to encumber all the funds before the Sept. 30 deadline.
Jen Ferland, the district’s executive director of strategic initiatives, told The Light that she is “confident” the district will meet all deadlines. “We are working closely with DESE (the state department of education) through each step of the process and are confident that we will meet all of the deadlines,” she said.
Superintendent O’Leary wrote an email to The Light, saying, “I’m excited to see the culmination of our strategy to close longstanding gaps in learning environments and student services.” He added, “New Bedford’s investment in non recurring projects avoids a fiscal cliff and ensures our students will see recurring benefits well into the future.”
The district will have an additional 14 months to spend the money as projects are completed, but if funds are not encumbered by the end of this month, they must be returned to the U.S. Treasury.
The last report on the ESSER spending, delivered at the August School Committee meeting, showed there was about $21 million left from the grant. Ferland said last week that the August data was out-of-date because the software system had been shut down as it updated. Ferland indicated that the district had made more progress on spending and encumbering the money.
The Light requested the most up-to-date data on how much money now remains in the grant, but Ferland’s emailed response did not include a specific number. “The encumbrances vary as contracts are awarded and bills are paid,” she wrote in an email. Ferland reiterated that the district is on track to meet all deadlines.
A data tracker from the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University shows many districts around the state and the country face a time crunch for spending and encumbering all their ESSER dollars. This tracker has not yet caught up to the district’s data for August, but it shows that New Bedford lags behind most other districts in the state for spending its ESSER money.
When the calendar page turns, that money will be gone one way or another.
Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org
What’s going on in the procurement office in New Bedford? Seems like they are dropping the ball if they are getting the bids out so late. Seems like there is more to this story.
Glad they are making real investments and using longer timelines. Or maybe they spend it quickly and blindly like Brockton where the above reports show it was all…gone.