For several years, a massive wave of federal pandemic relief funds helped school districts across the United States build, expand, and sustain what education experts call "high-impact" or "high-dosage" tutoring programs. These intensive academic interventions proved remarkably effective at helping students recover from widespread learning losses brought on by the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now that the primary source of that federal emergency funding has officially expired, education leaders nationwide are scrambling to figure out how to keep these successful programs afloat in an increasingly constrained fiscal environment.
The financial lifeline in question arrived between March 2020 and March 2021, when the United States Congress allocated nearly $190.5 billion to public education through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) fund. Representing the largest one-time federal investment in K-12 education in American history, ESSER provided school systems with unprecedented resources to address academic regression, student absenteeism, and socio-emotional challenges. Although this major influx of funding ended in phases between 2022 and 2024—with some individual districts securing limited extensions to liquidate remaining balances—the sudden expiration of the money has left a gaping hole in local education budgets.
In response to the vanishing federal dollars, school districts have taken diverging paths. Some have been forced to temporarily pause or significantly scale back their tutoring operations due to budgetary pressures, while others are working tirelessly to save the initiatives by weaving them directly into their core academic systems and permanent operational budgets. A 2026 analysis examining 35 school districts, conducted by the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA), revealed stark contrasts in how local education agencies are coping with the post-ESSER reality. The study found that eight districts had significantly reduced their tutoring footprint, and another eight had experienced a distinct pause or disruption in services following the formal conclusion of ESSER. However, more than half of the districts studied—19 in total—successfully preserved or even expanded their tutoring programs despite the financial cliff.
Extensive educational research demonstrates that high-impact tutoring, frequently designated as high-dosage tutoring, has served as the single most powerful intervention for making up for pandemic-era learning loss. Typically, these programs require students to meet at least three times a week, receiving targeted instructional support that coordinates closely with regular classroom curricula. According to the NSSA, programs featuring frequent sessions over a minimum duration of 10 weeks—delivered either individually or in small groups by trained educators using data-driven instruction—are capable of generating between three and 15 months of additional academic learning growth for participating students.
Despite these proven benefits, maintaining such intensive programs is remarkably expensive. Research compiled by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University estimates that high-impact tutoring costs anywhere from $1,200 to $2,500 per student annually. Without the cushion of federal ESSER funds, absorbing these recurring personnel and material costs has proven exceedingly difficult for the vast majority of school districts.
For schools that have heavily invested in these initiatives and are desperate to retain their long-term academic benefits, the primary challenge lies in institutionalizing tutoring so that it transitions from a temporary, grant-funded experiment into a standard, permanent fixture of the public school day. Devon Wible, vice president of teaching and learning at Catapult Learning, a private provider that delivers academic tutoring programs to schools, notes that districts across several states are increasingly viewing tutoring not as an optional add-on, but as a foundational layer of basic academic support.
"A few years ago, when ESSER funds were here, the conversation was, ‘Let’s see if it works,’" Wible observes, reflecting on the shift in institutional mindset. "Now it’s, ‘How do we sustain this?’"
Building Tutoring Into Existing Systems
One of the primary strategies districts are utilizing to make tutoring last is embedding it directly into the regular school day and aligning it with existing academic-support infrastructures. While this administrative integration does not completely eliminate the financial cost of hiring tutors, it is significantly less expensive than establishing a separate, standalone extracurricular program that requires after-school transportation, specialized staffing, and additional facility overhead.
Wible explains that some forward-thinking districts have successfully added dedicated intervention periods or "WIN" (What I Need) instructional blocks into their daily master schedules. These designated times give students access to vital extra academic support without pulling them away from core classroom instruction or forcing them to stay after school. She notes that this strategic approach also encourages much tighter professional collaboration among regular classroom teachers, specialized tutors, and school intervention staff, all of whom can routinely share student data and work collectively toward common academic targets.
Under this model, tutoring is explicitly designed to align with ongoing classroom instruction rather than operating in an isolated vacuum. A student who is struggling with grade-level reading skills, for instance, might receive targeted coaching on foundational phonics or decoding during the intervention block, while still continuing to engage with rich, grade-level literary texts alongside their peers in the regular classroom. Schools utilize continuous, real-time student performance data to identify specific learning needs, adjust instructional pacing, and determine precisely when an individual student has made enough progress to exit the program.
"Ultimately, our shared goal is that students experience classroom instruction, intervention and tutoring as one coherent learning experience," Wible says.
Wible has witnessed the tangible impact of this cohesive approach firsthand. A comprehensive analysis conducted by Catapult Learning involving approximately 700 students spanning kindergarten through third grade across 12 different Massachusetts school districts found that young learners made substantial literacy gains after receiving high-impact tutoring. In some cases, students achieved up to five additional months of reading progress above typical developmental expectations.
In one specific Massachusetts district, the results of this integration were particularly striking. Following a rigorous 12-week tutoring intervention, the share of kindergarten and first-grade students performing at or comfortably above grade-level benchmarks jumped dramatically from just 11% to 55%, according to Wible’s data.
Protecting What Works
While some districts are finding innovative ways to preserve their programs, David Blazar, an associate professor of education policy at the University of Maryland, warns that a deeper and potentially more insidious concern is what happens to program quality when cash-strapped schools cannot find alternative funding sources and are forced into quiet budgetary cutbacks.
Blazar recently co-authored a comprehensive University of Maryland study examining tutoring programs across all 24 of Maryland’s local school districts, analyzing the exact mechanisms by which these districts designed and scaled their academic interventions. The analysis revealed that 18 districts offered tutoring featuring several structural elements historically associated with stronger implementation and better outcomes, such as small-group instruction, frequent weekly sessions, and delivery during regular school hours.
Although the study focused specifically on Maryland, Blazar suggests it offers vital insight into the broader existential questions facing school districts nationwide as they attempt to sustain high-impact tutoring in the post-ESSER era. Rather than abolishing tutoring programs outright, Blazar anticipates that many districts will gradually compromise on core quality metrics by increasing group sizes, reducing the frequency of weekly sessions, or turning to lower-cost, less-rigorous providers.
"The more likely change is quieter and, in some ways, more consequential: erosion of the design features that make tutoring work," Blazar cautions. "When you have to find savings, dosage—and other components of quality, including how many students work with the same tutor simultaneously—are very likely to change."
Blazar’s analysis of local implementation plans under the ambitious Blueprint for Maryland’s Future initiative from 2024 to 2027 found that Maryland districts proactively planned to restructure their daily schedules to keep tutoring afloat. Because tutoring serves as a core statutory mandate of the state’s landmark education reform policy, he fully expects Maryland districts to maintain their long-term institutional commitment to the strategy.
"I think they will continue because it is a core part of the Blueprint, and there is growing consensus that tutoring is a critical resource for improving student outcomes, so it is money well spent," Blazar notes.
For school districts everywhere trying to stretch limited local and state dollars, the ultimate operational hurdle is figuring out precisely where to trim administrative costs without weakening the essential pedagogical features that make high-impact tutoring effective in the first place, Blazar emphasizes.
One District’s Approach
West Feliciana Parish Schools in Louisiana provides a clear real-world example of a school district successfully identifying alternative funding sources to seamlessly integrate high-impact tutoring into the regular school day. While the district maintained basic intervention practices prior to 2024, it dramatically expanded and formalized its school-day high-dosage tutoring program during the 2024-25 academic year with crucial financial assistance from the state of Louisiana through its Accelerate: High-Dosage Tutoring initiative.
To accommodate the program, the district engineered a comprehensive schoolwide master schedule featuring a dedicated 30- to 50-minute block each day when standard core instruction pauses across the board. During this dedicated window, students are systematically divided into targeted, skill-based groups and report either to their primary classroom teacher or a specialized interventionist for intensive high-dosage tutoring, according to Jodi Lemoine, director of accountability at West Feliciana Parish Schools.
Students who are not actively receiving tutoring during this block remain in the classroom environment to work independently, utilizing specialized educational software or engaging with library books. Meanwhile, fourth- and fifth-grade students receive specialized online tutoring delivered through external virtual providers.
This strategic approach significantly expanded the operational reach of the district’s academic intervention offerings. Before the implementation of the state-backed initiative, the local reading intervention program served roughly 96 students per week. Lemoine reports that that figure skyrocketed to more than 430 students after just one full year of the revamped schedule.
"From the get-go, our philosophy was: This is gonna require good teaching, not just programs," Lemoine says.
The district closely monitors individual student academic progress every two to three weeks, making agile instructional adjustments as necessary. Lemoine points to district assessment data showing notable achievement gains between the fall and spring assessments of the 2025-26 school year. According to standardized student data from the Northwest Evaluation Association’s Measures of Academic Progress, the district recorded substantial, measurable increases in overall student performance metrics.
The Louisiana Department of Education formally recognized the district as a Model of Excellence for its innovative and disciplined approach to high-dosage tutoring. By December 2024, more than 45% of all kindergarten through fifth-grade students in the district were receiving tutoring—representing more than double the volume of students reached previously. Furthermore, approximately 60% of participating students successfully reached the established performance benchmark on their targeted foundational literacy skill at the very first progress-monitoring checkpoint.
"We have figured out a way to use the resources we have smarter," Lemoine concludes. "Our high-dose tutoring program is truly an example of that: Work smarter, not harder."
Today, the district relies on a carefully managed combination of state and local funding streams to keep the initiative operational, but school leadership remains deeply committed to sustaining the program over the long haul. Superintendent Hollis Milton asserts that the district’s proven success demonstrates conclusively that effective academic tutoring does not simply have to vanish the moment a specific federal funding stream runs dry.
"If something’s working, you find the will, and then you’re gonna find the way," Milton says.