More NC parents could get $335 grants for remote learning during COVID-19
More COVID-19 relief might soon be coming to North Carolinians, including parents who missed their chance to get $335 checks to offset remote learning costs for their children.
Those Extra Credit grants, along with expanding rural broadband internet and personal protective equipment for schools, are part of a proposed bill filed Monday in the state Senate.
Senate Bill 36 would extend the application deadline to May 31. It is a bill in the state legislature, so this doesn’t include new federal COVID-19 funding for the checks. Rather, it allows the state to spend money already allocated but that North Carolina could have lost out on.
Sen. Brent Jackson, a lead sponsor of the bill, told The News & Observer in late December that extending the application deadline for the Extra Credit grants would be one of their first priorities of the session.
At the end of 2020, there was $62 million left in unspent funds for those parent checks. Now that the federal government allows more time for states to spend COVID-19 relief funds from the CARES Act, the new legislation would allow the rest of the money to be sent to qualifying parents.
Checks for $335 went out to more than 1 million parents in North Carolina, starting in October, who claimed a dependent child on their previous year’s taxes and lived in the state for all of 2019. Those parents who didn’t make enough money to file taxes and to get the checks automatically could fill out an application to the Department of Revenue. That deadline to apply was first in October, then extended to early December after a lawsuit. Even so, there were still parents who did not apply.
“It’s only fair to give them the opportunity to apply for it,” Jackson, a Sampson County Republican and chair of the Senate appropriations committee, told The N&O last month.
School reopening funding, broadband
The bill also includes $1.6 billion for schools, to help them reopen safely for in-person learning. That money would be given to an elementary and secondary school emergency relief fund in the Department of Public Instruction.
The bill includes state funding for a program to expand broadband internet, known as the GREAT grant program. That has been in the works for several weeks, and was green-lighted in December after negotiations over spending between the General Assembly’s Republican leadership and Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.
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This story was originally published February 1, 2021 at 4:51 PM with the headline "More NC parents could get $335 grants for remote learning during COVID-19."