Thousands of Baltimore City students will lose access to tutoring and after-school programs this week because of the Trump administration’s decision to not reimburse up to $418 million in COVID-era relief funds spent by Maryland schools.
Chief of Staff Alison Perkins-Cohen told WYPR that starting Tuesday, over one thousand students will stop receiving targeted in-school tutoring. And Friday will be the last day of after-school activities for around 3,000 students at 44 different schools.
That will give parents all of next week, while students are on spring break, to adjust their schedules, Perkins-Cohen said.
“When you make a plan and you make a commitment to spend money, just like the federal government did to the state, and the state to us and now us to vendors, people count on that,” she said.
The district will lose up to $48 million total, Perkins-Cohen said. Two-thirds of that money has already been spent as of the end of March. That’s leaving Baltimore City school leaders having to decide which programs to cut or stop now to fill the gap.
“You budget and you plan based on the understanding that you have of the financial landscape, and it just changed dramatically to the tune of $48 million,” Perkins-Cohen said. “We'll have to look to see, what else could we not do? What other things could we take resources from in order to cover this gap that we had definitely not planned for?”
District leaders could have easily spent all the money by the original pandemic relief deadline, Perkins-Cohen said. But after former President Joe Biden extended the cut-off during his term, they decided to be “more strategic” with the funding.
“With any grant funding, you're always against the clock, trying to make sure you get it spent in time,” Perkins-Cohen said. “And so when you get more time, then it lets you think a little bit about what would you do differently? We were able to look at things like tutoring and the impact of the programming we had done up to that point, and continue some of the ones that we thought were effective.”
Now, district leaders have to pause plans to upgrade locks on high school classroom doors, the chief of staff said. But some projects can’t be easily stopped, like renovations to school health facilities or bathrooms.
“We have to finish the work,” Perkins-Cohen said. “You can't leave a school without a health suite. You can't leave a bathroom taken apart, but not finished.”
Perkins-Cohen said no Baltimore City schools staff will lose their jobs because of this federal shortfall. But some teachers do work the after-school programs for extra income, she said, which they now will not receive.
