Dive Brief:

• Florida's Hillsborough County School District is taking a close look at a $100 million Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant that has paid for teacher-mentors and other support programs but is slated to expire in 2017.
• The programs have been credited for a number of positive changes, including boosts to teacher retention and rising test scores — but they are also costly.
• As the district looks to make cutbacks, officials are eyeing the grant-funded programs, which will cost an estimated $17-20 million a year to run. The district currently receives $14.3 million per year from the Gates Foundation.

Dive Insight:

In a time of outcry over shriveled school budgets, grants have become a way for districts to make changes they couldn’t otherwise afford. Big players like the Gates Foundation and Microsoft, as well as private investors like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, have offered up the money for major district efforts, from a total restructuring in Newark, NJ, to the overhauls in Hillsborough. But the question of what to do when those monies run out haunts those districts. In many cases, the grant pays for a staff person or two to design and establish the program, but not for the added costs that come with it. And even if it did, the money will run out eventually.

After a big wave of reform efforts five to seven years ago, many of those grants are approaching their ends, leaving big urban districts like Hillsborough scrambling to figure out how to pay for now-established and sometimes popular programs associated with them. In other cases, critics of the reforms see an end to the money and related initiatives as a welcome development.

Hillsborough is facing an added pinch. Under its former superintendent MaryEllen Mia, who is now New York state’s education commissioner, the district spent money from its financial reserve and now faces cutbacks as those funds run low. The reserves helped pay for key changes supported by the Gates grant. Among them: an overhaul in how teachers were paid, with payroll costs coming from the reserve. Without the option of spending that money, the district will have to find another source for those costs, which were as high as $15,000 a teacher.

The district’s current superintendent has called for outside auditors to help assess his budget and make a determination, adding that any program that will continue to receive funding will have to prove its worth.