Eight months ago the New Jersey Department of Education announced a “Learning Acceleration Program: High-Impact Tutoring” competitive grant program, funded by $52 million and intended to address the staggering amount of learning loss endured by children through COVID school closures and remote instruction. Gov. Phil Murphy said at the time, “as a state that prides itself on delivering the high-quality education our children deserve, addressing the effects of learning loss on our students’ progress remains a top priority.”

This leaves us with one of two possible conclusions: either Gov. Murphy and Commissioner Angelica Allen-McMillan don’t see addressing learning loss as a “top priority” or the DOE is incompetent.

The word on the street from school district leaders is the answer is the latter, confirmed today when Tina Kelley of Advance Media broke the story that, indeed, district leaders’ fears are justified: the Oct. 11th deadline is past, no one’s “heard anything,” and “many steps remain before tutoring can begin.” Also, superintendents anticipate further delays.

Upon last February’s announcement of the competitive grant program, school leaders were excited: after all, high-dosage tutoring, two or three times a week in small groups, is seen as the best intervention for struggling students, particularly in reading and math, and the guidance sent out from the DOE said tutoring would be begin on October 11th. Yet over the last few weeks rumors were flying that the DOE isn’t close to meeting its goal of notifying districts about whether their grants proposals are approved. One school leader told me that people are afraid to ask about updates because “the DOE can be very punitive” and this is a competitive grant.

Wayne Township Public Schools’ superintendent Mark Toback told Kelley he thinks the DOE has pushed the notification of grants to December.“If this is done in some point in December, we come up against the holidays,” he said. “That pushes it into January.” He added, “it is much more difficult to spend that amount of money in a drastically reduced time frame. This is a state-wide initiative that would benefit kids, and you’re losing critical time to help kids with pandemic recovery.”

How many kids? In Wayne alone, about 1,000 students, Toback estimates.

Maurice Township School District superintendent Jeremy Cohen said everything is in flux: “We have not gotten any word nor any notice from the state of funds being approved. We have not been able to start the tutoring yet, even in-house.” Also, he’s heard the DOE may require districts to solicit bids for tutoring vendors, even if the vendors are already on the DOE’s list of approved vendors. “No one seems to have the answer at this point,” he said. “It seems to be a waiting game.”

Senate Majority Leader Teresa Ruiz, former chair of the Senate Education Committee, expressed “deep frustration” with Murphy’s DOE:

“There is no sense of urgency from the state in creating an expedited, resourced, and tried program to help support our teachers and our students in this post-pandemic time,” she told NJ Advance Media. “We know high-impact tutoring works.”

While the governor often calls a state of emergency for health and weather problems, the state should call one now, she said, when 50% of all students, and 75% of Black and Latino students, are not reading at grade level.

“That, to me, is also a state of emergency,” she said. “That should be a state of emergency for everyone.”

When queried, the DOE wouldn’t answer questions about when they’ll announce grant winners, when districts can start tutoring programs, whether districts would indeed have to solicit bids from approving tutoring vendors, or whether there will be updated guidance.

“The DOE is a mess,” one school leader told me. “People on the ground are not happy.”