Congress passed three coronavirus relief acts within a 1-year period that provided more than $275 billion for an Education Stabilization Fund to prevent, prepare for, and respond to the coronavirus, including $189.5 billion for the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER). The American Rescue Plan Act (ARP) provided $122 billion for ESSER to help State educational agencies (SEA) and local educational agencies (LEA) safely reopen and sustain the safe operation of schools and address the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on students. Ensuring that ARP ESSER funds are used effectively by grantees and achieve the intended impact is critical to help address the needs of students and educators. The Puerto Rico Department of Education (Puerto Rico DOE) was allocated about $3 billion in ARP ESSER funds to support 860 schools serving about 261,000 students. The objective of our inspection was to determine whether Puerto Rico DOE ensured that (1) services contracted for and paid with ARP ESSER funds to measure students’ academic progress were provided as required and (2) results were used as intended to modify individual students’ instructional plans and help prevent academic failure.
We found that Puerto Rico DOE did not ensure that the services contracted for and paid with ARP ESSER funds to measure students’ academic progress were provided in accordance with the executed contract. It also did not ensure that teachers used the results of the contractor-administered student academic proficiency assessments as intended to modify individual students’ instructional plans and help prevent academic failure. As a result, Puerto Rico DOE used $3.9 million in ARP ESSER funds to pay for student academic proficiency interim assessments that a contractor did not administer timely (10- and 20-week assessments) or at all (30- and 40-week assessments), and that did not achieve the intended purposes of helping teachers develop differentiated work plans based on each student’s academic lag, diagnose students’ immediate learning needs, and implement targeted re-teaching strategies effectively. We made four recommendations to ensure that the $3.9 million in ARP ESSER funds are not wasted, future contract work is adequately supervised by Puerto Rico DOE, and contractors are not paid for services they did not perform or that were outside the scope of the contract
