MEDIA CONTACT: Robert Gaines, rgaines@gpee.org, 404-223-2464
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November 30, 2023 –
The Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education today released the Year-Two 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, and the Year-One Report, released in November 2022. 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 Year-Two Report’s findings show that Georgia’s school districts and state-commission charter schools are using federal pandemic-relief funds to improve the core instruction they deliver to students every day. School systems are also continuing the strategies they implemented over the past two years to accelerate student learning and address their unmet mental health and other non-academic needs. Their investments in expanding, retaining, and building the knowledge and skills of the educator workforce are integral to these efforts
Running through June 2025, the high-level goals of the project are to:
- Generate actionable knowledge that supports student success
- Facilitate the application of emerging knowledge in district and state policy
- Bolster public support for public education
Moving forward, the project will to:
- survey school districts in 2024 and capture information on their use of federal COVID-19 relief funds; stakeholder interviews to more closely examine issues identified in the survey;
- 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.
“This year-two report is another critical marker in our study of how school district leaders in Georgia are leveraging the CARES funds to support student learning in the midst of the pandemic and identifying promising practices that can be sustained beyond the federal relief funding,” Georgia Partnership President Dr. Dana Rickman said. “We’re looking forward to our case studies and presenting a more comprehensive view of what school district leaders have learned and how they’re mapping that learning to the present and future needs of students.”