(The Center Square) – Wisconsin schools spent 41% of the $1.49 billion in pandemic recovery federal funding on permanent salaries rather than temporary learning recovery solutions while allocating the funding slowly and without transparency, according to a new report.
The funding came as the state’s public schools added 2,141 staff while losing 47,092 students from 2019-2020 to 2024-2025, according to the in-depth spending analysis from the Institute for Reforming Government.
“It was a lack of guidance issue,” IRG Senior Research Director Quinton Klabon told TCS. “… It was a free-for-all, you could do mostly what you wanted to do and, as a result, districts backfilled expenses they wanted to have that they couldn’t afford with all the students leaving and that’s how we ended up with this situation.”
The result is that Wisconsin public schools had the most employees in state history in 2024-2025 while educating the fewest students it had since 1991-1992.
The IRG report analyzed 17,830 school district allocations from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund to evaluate the areas the additional pandemic funding was spent because the state and the Department of Public Instruction did not provide that information in a dashboard like many other states did, instead updating the spending in a long series of PDFs that were not meaningfully categorized, the analysis showed.
“Some states had very transparent live dashboards where every month they update the numbers and here’s a pie chart showing what we did on our website,” Klabon said. “DPI did not do that. They created just a webpage with 450 PDFs. They didn’t say which one was updated, so you wouldn’t know if it was updated if you didn’t know what to look for. There were over 18,000 line items of allocations that district had.”
The IRG numbers are available in a searchable district-based report.
The state’s schools had two years to allocate the funding, with districts accepting an extra $1,745.98 per public-school student over two years. Districts had allocated just 34% of the funding in the first six months of the program and 79% through the first 17 months in a program intended to combat pandemic learning loss.
A Harvard study showed Wisconsin schools ranked 30th in reading recovery and 16th in math.
Specific allocation examples included Milwaukee spending $193 million on construction projects, including athletics facilities and renovations at schools likely to close.
IRG said that the funding should have been used for one-time needs such as curriculum purchases, technology upgrades, deferred renovations and short-burst tutoring rather than spending it on permanent staffing increases.
“I think, when you add an employee or two every year and it adds up to 10 or 20 over the decade or, when you lose students and you don’t realize you have more adults per student than you’ve ever had in Wisconsin history, by a long shot, I just don’t think they think of that historical understanding,” Klabon said. “So they look at their budgets and they’re running out of money … A lot more districts need to understand that this is the result of choices that have added up over the years.”
