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December 30, 2024 –
The Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education (Georgia Partnership) today released the Year-Three Report from its CARES Impact Study, a multi-year, multi-strand research project designed to examine Georgia school districts’ use of Federal COVID relief funds. The study was launched in 2021 with funding from the Georgia Department of Education. Its aim is to understand how local school districts are spending relief funds and identify best practices to help students recover from the pandemic’s negative effects on student learning and well-being. This report follows the Baseline Report, released in January 2022; the Year-One Report, released in November 2022; and the Year-Two Report, released in November 2023. These reports describe the shift in local districts’ use of relief funds from crisis management in the first 18 months of the pandemic, which focused on providing instruction safely, to recovery mode, developing a mix of strategies to help students who were behind academically or struggling with mental health or other issues. The report also follows the release of the project’s first case study: Rewriting How Literacy is Taught: How Three School Districts are Changing How Students Learn to Read, which focuses on closing learning gaps through literacy reform.
The Year-Three Report’s findings show that heading into the 2024-2025 school year, Georgia’s students continued to experience pandemic-related academic and mental health challenges. However, the federal funding designed to help students and schools recover from these impacts expired in September 2024, and most school districts are now struggling to provide supplemental support strategies at the depth and scale that they did during the last four school years. While some districts and schools have found ways to sustain the selected intervention strategies that boosted student learning and wellbeing, many have not.
Running through June 2025, the project will continue to:
- Develop case studies with an in-depth analysis of the use and impact of funds; and
- Facilitate stakeholder roundtables, briefings, and presentations to elevate best practices and what is working in Georgia school districts.
“What’s clear in this Year-Three report is that district and school leaders believe many of the investments they made during the pandemic were effective in achieving positive outcomes for students,” Georgia Partnership President Dr. Dana Rickman said. “However, in the absence of ESSER funds, sustaining those investments longterm will prove difficult. Consequently, we believe that state policymakers have an opportunity to address the pandemic-related academic and mental health needs students continue to bring to the classroom by providing ongoing resources for districts and schools. Doing so would also lay a foundation for both state and local leaders to identify, implement, and sustain effective practices.”