Unelected bureaucrats in the state Education Department have dragged their feet on spending critical COVID relief funding for Catholic and other nongovernment-school kids, undermining the efforts of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the state Legislature to deliver for all our state’s schoolchildren and potentially dumping the issue onto the lap of the governor amid a leadership transition.
The funding, known as Emergency Assistance to Nonpublic Schools, was authorized months ago. First Team Trump and then Team Biden, joined by Congress, passed EANS measures to help all schools respond to COVID, especially in shouldering pandemic-related learning loss, as well as sanitization supplies, personal protective equipment, improved ventilation, physical barriers and remote-learning tech.
While public schools received far greater flexibility in how they could use funds and which schools were eligible, religious and independent schools were also supposed to receive money. Funding remains critically needed and deeply appreciated.
Given ideological bias against religious and private schools in some quarters, securing EANS was a heavy lift in Congress. In both the 2020 and 2021 fights, Schumer expended valuable political capital to push for the funds, against the wishes of some members of his own party who wanted to focus solely on public-school kids; the nonpublic school community praised him for the actions.
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