Since 2020, Maine has received more than one billion dollars in federal COVID relief funds to improve education. According to a recent article by the Maine Wire, Maine has entered into a $120,000 contract with the Maine Trust for Local News – the nonprofit parent of the Portland Press Herald and other dailies throughout the state – to pay for favorable coverage of how the state has spent federal relief funds. In essence, the Mills administration is spending federal pandemic relief funds on telling the public how good it is at spending relief funds.

Maine should not be spending COVID-19 relief funds to convince the public it has done a good job spending COVID-19 relief funds. Further, Maine still has not spent a large portion of the federal funding it has received. Yet, during the pandemic period of increased federal funding, Maine’s education system declined compared to other states. Maine should be more responsible in using these funds to combat our education system’s growing problems, as we will lose unused COVID relief funding at the end of the year.

The federal government has given Maine more than one billion dollars in COVID relief funding, but $123 million remains unspent. Over 99% of the remaining money is from the American Rescue Plan Act, which was enacted partly to support education during and after the pandemic. Despite this large amount of federal funding, Maine’s student performance has seriously declined compared to other states since 2020.

While other states also received a large amount of ARPA funding, Maine received the 13th-most per capita. Maine can’t claim that the comparative decline in our students’ performance is due to a lack of funding, as we have received far more funding per person than most other states. What’s more, if a lack of funding is the cause of this decline in performance, then it is Maine’s fault for not spending more of its allotted ARPA funds. 

By 2023, states had spent or appropriated 87% of ARPA funds assigned to them. Meanwhile, Maine only spent 66.8% of the ARPA funds we received. The deadline for spending ARPA funds is quickly approaching, as any funds from ARPA that remain unobligated by the end of 2024 will return to the US Department of the Treasury. This gives states perverse incentive to spend the money, even if it’s unneeded. 

While the Mills administration has historically been more than willing to overspend on a long list of unwise government projects, they seem unwilling to do so with this federal funding. It should be noted that this money is in a “use it or lose it” status, and it will either help Mainers now or go into some less effective federal pot for later. 

The Mills administration should have been proactive in using these funds to address the massive decline in Maine student performance, including learning loss, during the pandemic. Instead, the Maine Department of Education has been busy trying to redefine metrics of success in public education to hide the abysmal performance of Maine schools and students. 

It’s also funny what all this unspent “relief” funding means for consumers in the context of inflation, one of the biggest issues this election season. Some politicians have claimed the COVID-era inflation we experienced was a result of corporate greed. Meanwhile, states like Maine are sitting on more than $100 million in unspent aid. Collectively, states are likely sitting on billions in unspent relief money from various pandemic-era programs. 

Corporate greed wasn’t the driver of inflation during this period. But printing trillions of dollars out of thin air and handing it out to every state, county, and municipality in the country certainly had something to do with it.