The fact that all local school budgets were approved by voters on Tuesday shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Between additional state aid approved by the state Legislature and federal pandemic aid, most of the proposed budgets came with either no tax increase or a nominal increase in local property taxes.

But local voters should make sure they are paying attention to how school districts are proposing to spend that federal pandemic aid. New York state received about $12.5 billion while school districts received a total of $9 billion in direct aid — and that’s on top of aid in the December stimulus bill.

In our view, routine expenses should remain the domain of local taxpayers.

Care must be taken in planning what’s best for the needs of the individual district. Some districts may need major renovations to heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems to promote breathing easier for all who work and learn there. Others may require wholesale updating of their technology platforms to platforms to best prepare for effective online learning.

Care must be taken as well to ensure maximum input from the school district’s administrators, teaching staff, parents and students so that final spending decisions reflect a broad consensus of a district’s stakeholders.

We have already seen that many local school districts are planning intensified and expanded summer-school programming this year to help compensate for the demonstrated backslide in learning many students have experienced from long periods of virtual learning throughout the school year now ending.

How else will the money be spent? Many schools will likely have a lot of money to spend helping students make up for lost time, and what we don’t want to see happen is the federal money spent trying to return to a status quo that has lead to struggling students, particularly in Jamestown and Dunkirk, where teachers deal with high levels of poverty and children who struggle to meet state standards for a variety of reasons.

The federal investment is enough to do more than simply make up for time lost to COVID-19 — it’s enough to created targeted programs that help children achieve more than they would have if COVID-19 had never happened and schools had never been closed in the first place. Setting our sights on getting back to the way things were means, especially in the county’s urban school districts, that we are simply getting back to a failure to meet state standards.

Taxpayers shouldn’t settle for that. They should demand better.