The Covid-19 budget crisis stands to entrench public education funding woes and inequality.

PK Diffenbaugh is a little perplexed. As superintendent of Monterey Peninsula Unified School District, he’s wondering if people know what exactly they are asking when they call for the economy to reopen. “I have been surprised education hasn’t been more at the forefront of the news considering the reopening of our economy is dependent on an education system that is open and serving our students,” he says.

Right now, it’s unclear how many public schools will be able to open in the fall considering they are being asked to do more with less: Schools must protect students from catching coronavirus, with budgets that are expected to face unprecedented cuts.

California is facing a $54 billion deficit, and since one of the state’s largest expenditures is K-12 education, the shortage in school funding could cause a “train wreck,” to use Diffenbaugh’s term.

He points out that students currently in high school entered the education system following the Great Recession that started in 2008, when school budgets were devastated.

“It means a whole generation of kids is going to spend the majority of their education at vastly underfunded schools,” he says. “As a society, we have to ask, ‘Is this what we want for our kids?’”

This time around, the situation appears worse because of deeper cuts and lackluster help from the federal government. In 2009, Congress gave public education $56.5 billion (adjusted for inflation) through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. By comparison, the CARES Act provides $13.2 billion through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, and $3 billion for the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund.

And hundreds of millions in CARES Act funding for education will be rerouted to private schoolsif U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has her way. DeVos’ new interpretation of a longstanding federal funding formula would mean, for example, that MPUSD would have to fork over a substantial portion of its aid to private schools.

“It’s incomprehensible that someone wants to shift our money to a group of very privileged students when our students need so much more than they are getting,” Diffenbaugh says.

For Karina Barger, head of Bay View Academy Monterey, a K-8 charter school of 500 students, the next few months are about weighing different bad options. With her staffing level and the likely requirement of smaller class sizes – state education reopening guidelines have been frustratingly slow to come – Barger says kids might only attend school every other day.

“We are the infrastructure that will determine if millions of kids are safe and healthy,” she says. “We are on the front lines of this pandemic. These budget cuts make it so that opening schools is unsafe. It’s immoral that we are asked to do it.”

California suffers from some of the lowest levels of investment in public schools in the country. Part of the problem is the dependence on sales and income tax revenue, which fluctuate from year to year. Property taxes, which are more stable, are at artificially low levels because of Proposition 13, which froze taxes at 1976 levels.

“When our economy grinds to a halt, it really hits us,” Diffenbaugh says. “Schools are disproportionately impacted by an economic standstill.”