After years of cash windfalls, California schools are bracing for a stretch of austerity that could jeopardize students’ already precarious recovery from the pandemic. An end to billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief funds, declining enrollment, staff raises, hiring binges and stagnant state funding should combine over the next few months to create steep budget shortfalls, with low-income districts affected the most. Still, the fiscal outlook is not as dire as during the 2008 recession, said Julien Lafortune, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. School funding generally in California has risen dramatically since then, lifting California from the bottom half of states in school funding to above the national average. In addition, the state’s shift to the Local Control Funding Formula a decade ago has provided more money for students with higher needs, although inequities persist. But that doesn’t mean these cuts won’t hurt, Lafortune said, especially for students most affected by the pandemic. Low-income, Black and Latino students disproportionately bore the brunt of school closures, research from Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) has shown, because they were more likely to suffer economically from the pandemic, less likely to have adequate technology at home, and less likely to have a parent available to help them with distance learning. “It’s not like the Great Recession, but I think the challenges are greater now,” Lafortune said. “A lot of the academic progress we made was erased by the pandemic.”