US didn't track more than $150B in pandemic school aid. AP did.

Reporters Geoff Mulvihill and Collin Binkley, data journalists Camille Fassett and Larry Fenn, video journalist Mike Householder and photographers Carlos Osorio and Charles Krupa teamed up on an all-formats project documenting what happened to historic sums of pandemic aid released to the nation’s schools.

Congress has sent more than $150 billion to the states to help K-12 schools since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, but the federal government has no accounting of where that money went. Over a period of months, Mulvihill, Fassett and Fenn did that painstaking work, going state by state to ferret out how multiple streams of congressional funding as used. The result was a massive but granular database shared with AP customers in advance of publication, showing how much federal money each school district in the country received and how it compared to other schools — public, private and charter.

With reporting help from Binkley, the team also produced three distinctive news leads: Most school districts do not intend to spend the money in the transformative ways the Biden administration envisions; virtual schools that were already fully online before the pandemic received as much or more than traditional school districts, including those serving high-poverty communities; and some Republican governors used the windfall to further school choice policies such as private school vouchers that had previously been blocked by legislatures or courts.

Drawing on AP’s national reach, the work resulted in data that customers could localize as well as two explanatory webinars and sidebars in more than a dozen states by AP statehouse reporters.