In March of 2020, as the COVID pandemic began to shutdown the world, Congress approved the American Rescue Plan Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ARP ESSER).  This fund would provide $190 billion in emergency relief money to states to spread among their school districts to address the impact the COVID-19 pandemic on education across the country.  The fact that every district in the USA now suffers from “pandemic related learning loss,” the program was pretty much a spendthrift failure.

At any rate, in 2021 Connecticut received $1.1 billion of Joe Biden’s money, to which Hartford Public Schools was allotted $155 million.  As long as your district administration folks could talk and walk upright, your district was getting this money, you needn’t be a seasoned grant writer to successfully receive a federal stimulus check in your school’s mailbox.

However, at a recent Board of Education meeting, Hartford Public Schools Superintendent Torres-Rodriguez was speaking like she had secured federal funding by channeling her inner Matthew Lesko.  “We were very successful,” she said, we “used a model application.”  HPS received their COVID relief funds “through successful grant applications,” she said.  HPS received COVID relief funds because there was a COVID pandemic, the applications were only used to track that the funds weren’t being used to send superintendents on vacation, which some most likely still did. States initially received the money from D.C. and using formulas on top of formulas, determined each district’s share of the state’s total relief package.  Completing an application which sounded like it may be related to pandemic related education issues or safety, would get your district those funds.

Then the Superintendent goes on to claim that HPS spent the COVID funds in a way that “other districts didn’t do.”  Torres-Rodriguez claims her use of the funds was unique in that they were spent in a manner which aligned with HPS’ strategic operating plan.  She stated that HPS ensured that they funds were spent “effectively and efficiently” to “make the biggest impact” (“How Did Hartford Schools Spend $155 Million in COVID Relief Aid?”).

Well, she joined hundreds of others who submitted testimony to the Connecticut Legislature on the school funding bill HB5003 in January, testimony that mimicked hundreds of others when she wrote of the “looming fiscal cliff” faced by districts when the COVID relief money runs out. Help us!  Hardly sounding like someone who had spent like “other districts didn’t’ do,” “effectively and efficiently.”  As for her spending impact, nearly 3 years later, everything from attendance, to grades, to behaviors, to a loss by the football team, Torres-Rodriguez is putting down to being part of the “pandemic related” loss.  Just like other districts are doing.  Where is the unique “impact?”

Superintendent Torres-Rodriguez and BOE Chairman Rigueur take pains to “remind everybody” that there were very “explicit” rules to spending these funds, there were “very strict guidelines.”  Don’t let them kid you, the rushed manner in which these funds were approved and printed left little time for writing rules and creating spending oversight plans.  A Government Accountability Office report speaks to the doors left open for fraud and errors from the quick drafting and passing of relief legislation during an emergency.   A Brookings Institute report speaks to the problems created by the size and emergency distribution required for the funds, the lack of “internal controls” and spending “safeguards.”  Collecting data for what spending oversight existed was difficult to impossible.  HPS spent ESSER funds on surveys and video game labs.  Very strict rules.

It is painfully and pitifully obvious that the district’s reports on the carrying out of HPS business is being done as if it is being reported to the beautiful and capable children of Milner Middle School, and the BOE is enabling this phony fiasco.  Nothing from either of them can be trusted or believed and much more is hidden. 

Sometimes when you pour Coca-Cola on pork, worms will crawl right out.