Five years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that disrupted schools and lives in unforgettable ways, UNC School of Education professors Thad Domina, Ph.D., and Ethan Hutt, Ph.D., know that some people just want to forget about it.
But their new research on North Carolina’s educational leaders’ agility amid the disruption shows that there’s still much we can learn about crisis, the role of our educational institutions, and how good policy can strengthen and empower school districts — both in and outside of an emergency.
In their recent paper “Framing the Pandemic: Tracking Educational Problem Formulation, Spring 2020-Fall 2021,” Domina, the Robert Wendell Eaves Sr. Distinguished Professor in Educational Leadership, and Hutt, the Gary Stuck Faculty Scholar in Education, share what they found after analyzing texts from the 648 applications that local North Carolina school districts and charter schools submitted over the three phases of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding.
Domina and Hutt presented the research in June 2025 at meeting of the North Carolina Learning Research Network – a partnership between the UNC School of Education, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, and the North Carolina Collaboratory – which convened academic researchers, practitioners, and policymakers for a day of presentations and discussions featuring practice-informed research and how that research’s findings can improve North Carolina K-12 and post-secondary education. The North Carolina Collaboratory funded Domina and Hutt’s research on ESSER funding.
While so much of how we now characterize the pandemic’s impact on education focuses on learning loss from remote schooling, Domina and Hutt offer a more nuanced view of the complex needs of districts and how those evolved as the pandemic wore on.
By and large, they said the state’s educational leaders knew what to do. Those leaders responded quickly, came up with innovative solutions, and pivoted with the needs on the ground.
“To push the decision-making on how to use those resources down to the local level, to ask the school, district, and charter school leaders to make sense of what was going on around them and develop strategies themselves, was a decision made of necessity, and it was a wise one,” Domina said.
How did educational leaders respond?
So, what really happened when the pandemic hit, and how well did North Carolina’s public and charter schools respond from the onset up until districts started to return to in-person schooling?
In the springs of 2020 and 2021, the U.S. Department of Education allotted around $190 billion — ESSER funding — from the Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act to state educational agencies for the purpose of providing elementary and secondary schools with emergency funding to manage the new crisis. States granted those funds to local educational agencies (LEAs) in three phases with few limitations, empowering them to make sense of what problems the pandemic posed to schools in their communities and use the funds how they saw fit.
The research team started thinking about this work around the time students were returning to in-person instruction, and there was a sense that the pandemic was resolving. Questions circulated about how ESSER funding had been spent and whether it was spent wisely. Had it worked?
The dominant narrative had become one of learning loss from remote instruction. But from the beginning, the pandemic posed a multifaceted problem for schools, and the ESSER funding applications show that LEAs recognized that. Domina and Hutt’s work broadens that conversation by looking at the phases of the pandemic and how schools’ needs changed as it played out.
“The question [if ESSER funding worked] was being framed almost entirely around student achievement, and to us, that felt too narrow,” said Domina. “We very quickly forgot how complicated the pandemic was, particularly in those early moments.”
Domina and Hutt argue that organizational sensemaking — or “the process through which people work to understand issues or events that are novel, ambiguous, confusing, or in some way violate expectations” (Maitlis and Christianson 2014, p. 57) — provides an important lens for understanding ESSER and its implementation.
The data showed the applications for funding from North Carolina LEAs — after their leaders had made sense of their district’s unique needs — fell into four categories:
- Public health,
- Academics and learning loss,
- Student and community well-being, and
- Instructional access.
LEAs’ applications communicated needs for sanitation supplies and training on pandemic spread, upgrades to HVAC systems, and PPE. LEAs also had immediate instructional needs, like access to technology and internet services, remote technology for classrooms, software, and strategies for students with special needs. Broader concerns around student and community well-being required additional staffing of school counselors and social workers and partnerships with local nonprofits to help families access critical services. Academic concerns in applications pointed to the need for progress monitoring tools to track achievement and the need for tutors as concerns of learning loss grew.
All applications included references to all four categories to varying degrees and in varying ways. District leaders assessed the needs on the ground based on the emergencies happening in their community. For instance, in districts where the infection rate was high, applications reflected more requests for tools to support public health. Many charter schools focused more on academic requests — which is in line with their organizational mission around certain kinds of academics or educational approaches, Hutt said.
“What was really interesting was that the extent to which they were focused on those four areas varied dramatically across districts and then also changed over time as the pandemic progressed. At the start, concern was relatively evenly distributed among those four buckets, but two — student and community well-being, and public health — were leading. Fast forward a year or so, and those two had kind of moved into the background, and learning loss was by far the predominant concern,” Domina said.
“Even within districts that were similar in terms of their environments and demographics, they made different choices, or they perceived the challenges in different ways and responded, which reflects the theory behind the policy as constructed,” Hutt said.
In any crisis, the people closest to the ground know the real issues more acutely and how to distribute help where it needs to go. From an organizational standpoint, Domina and Hutt’s research shows that local leaders acted quickly to care for their communities. From a policy perspective, it suggests that, sometimes, this is the most efficient way to act.
“There are many times when it may make sense to direct people’s attention to a particular area that needs it. But this helps us understand that we have a system of education that is dramatically decentralized, and I think good policy can use that as a strength, rather than treating it as a weakness,” Domina said.
Making sense of it
The researchers stress that North Carolina is about as well-positioned as any state in the country to handle an opportunity like the one presented by ESSER funding — the state has good data, a sophisticated Department of Public Instruction, and strong leaders. The specificity and variety with which they responded to COVID across time, and how well they read the shifting needs, signals that policy should harness these assets for good.
Hutt said that sometimes people forget that, for children and families, schools are a nexus, and the pandemic was a blunt reminder. Schools and districts provide not only education, but also care for children, oversight while parents are working, spaces for children to interact, health services, and food.
“We should empower our local school leaders to do the most with what they have, and I think we can do more to design policy with that in mind,” Hutt said. “When the pandemic gets collapsed to criticism about not going back in-person fast enough, or not doing enough, it’s a bit of revisionism. You can always say in retrospect that more attention could have been paid to a certain area. But that’s not what it was like in the moment.”
“Sensemaking happens with any policy. And this policy was defined in a way that gave them a lot of discretion to make sense of it,” Domina said. “We have the capacity for doing that implementation. I think the other side of that is policy needs to be really thoughtful about maintaining and building, respecting that capacity.”
Both researchers think there’s going to be a long tail to the events of the pandemic as it relates to education. Even as many move on or try to forget how traumatic it was, they’re going to keep researching and writing about it, continuing to examine it, and drawing out what we can take from it to keep making our educational systems better.
“We’re hoping that through research, we can really help people understand the totality of this experience and its effects on our schools,” Hutt said.
Domina said this close look at ESSER funding has changed the way he thinks about his work and education research. Educators and educational leaders are often trying to come up with the best strategies that work for business as usual, when in reality, leaders often need to be nimble. What can we learn about the quick pivots schools made in COVID?
“People sometimes forget how messy and complicated the life of a school is. But educators never forget that. Their work is all about making sense of the mess and trying to find a way forward amidst complexity. I think honoring that complexity and ability to improvise is a key to excellent educational research and professional preparation,” Domina said.