Tulsa Public Schools is making plans for funding expected under President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats' $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, a top official told NPR Tuesday.
"We are essentially leveraging these dollars to come back from the massive impact that this pandemic had on our students and be able to provide those additional supports that will allow them to recover from all of this," Jorge Robles, TPS chief financial and operations officer, told host Ailsa Chang in an interview on All Things Considered.
The district previously announced an assortment of support programming and services to address pandemic learning loss and other effects of a year of interrupted learning, including one-on-one tutoring programs, expanded counseling opportunities, free summer day camps and free before- and after-school care for elementary students.
Robles said the federal dollars will greatly help the district stand up those initiatives.
"It would be extremely hard to do those. So we would have - probably have to change the scale of which we could have been doing them. Having a stimulus package of the size that was authorized, it allows us to essentially put these programs in place for a longer period of time and then have a better degree of success on supporting our students," Robles told Chang.
The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which passed the House and Senate without any Republican support, allocates $130 billion to K-12 schools to assist with costs incurred dealing with the pandemic.
