2021 stimulus check will be “huge for us,” says county rep

PHOTO: The Davis Joint Unified School District will likely utilize stimulus funds for a return to campus on April 12, and is already utilizing funds for cohorts and personal protective equipment.

By Lewis Herring-Tillman,

BlueDevilHUB.com Staff–

Passed by the U.S. Senate on March 6, the American Rescue Plan stimulus package is now one step closer to getting a whopping $170 billion dollars to school districts. But exactly how much money is going to the Davis Joint Unified School District is uncertain.

The federal stimulus package has authorized the transfer of trillions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury. The education funds will be passed down from the U.S. Department of Education, to the California Department of Education, and finally to the individual school districts.

“These layers of bureaucracy mean it’s difficult to know for certain exactly how much money districts will receive,” Yolo County public information officer Anthony Volkar said.

According to the Senate Budget Committee, the total $170 billion dedicated to schools in the American Rescue Plan is subdivided into $126 billion dollars for K-12, $40 billion for higher education such as colleges and universities, and $2.7 billion for governors and state administrations.

The total amount of education funding in the American Rescue Plan is five times more than that of the CARES Act passed in March of 2020, and twice as much as was in the December relief package.

“This is going to be huge for us,” Volkar said. “It’s going to be very helpful.”

DJUSD, along with many other school districts across the country, had previously failed to use the majority of the funds they were allotted in 2020, especially the funds given in the early weeks of the pandemic.

“Because, once again, it can take a while for funds to be allotted, by the end of May only about 1 percent of the stimulus funds passed down to California school districts had been spent,” Volkar said.

However, the nature of spending is different this time around. In the beginning of the pandemic, much of the funding that came to school districts went to supporting distance learning and alleviating a gaping deficit in spending. Now, the relief is targeted towards helping schools reopen; Davis High will be reopening in a hybrid model on April 12.

“One thing we as a district have been really focusing on recently is learning loss mitigation, which could be through summer school or an extended school year,” Volkar said. “The stimulus would be essential for those things.”

Correction: Anthony Volkar is the public information officer for the Yolo County Department of Education, not for DJUSD, as previously written.