Marguerite Roza, Director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, has been warning school districts around the country that the time of fiscal reckoning is nigh. Why? When the Biden Administration invested $126 billion in learning recovery from the pandemic, it told leaders to use the money for “Non-Recurring Investments with Long-Term Impact” like statewide tutoring programs, summer schools, acceleration academies, and/or intensive academic boot-camps, mental health services, upgrades to technology and facilities.. Yet many have used the money for recurring expenses like payroll. All the money has to be spent by November 2024, just over a year from now, and this year school boards, in NJ and elsewhere, are faced with a “fiscal cliff.”

What is this fiscal cliff? The imminent end of federal COVID relief money that schools have been relying on during the pandemic. “The feds pushed a lot of money into the K-12 system,” said Lori Taylor, an education finance researcher at Texas A&M University. “Now the districts are being weaned off of that funding — they’re losing that shock absorber, that cushion.”

For New Jersey, that cushion has been almost $3 billion dollars doled out with little oversight from the state Department of Education. Here’s Kyle Rosenkrans:  The Murphy Administration has chosen“to passively funnel those dollars via grants to hundreds of…tiny school districts with minimal guidance beyond minimum legal requirements.”

So here we go: starting right now, school boards will be forced to contemplate exactly what they’re going to cut. Some have incomplete plans for building construction but those come with recurring costs, especially as construction prices rise. Some have hired extra teachers and support staff; there will be lay-offs. Roza refers to this as the “bloodletting.”

Here is her timeline. Now, more than ever, stakeholders must pay attention.