The Des Moines Register recently published an article highlighting six new superintendents hired recently to lead Des Moines area school districts. One of the questions asked by the newspaper reporter was:
“What are the top three things you are spending ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) funds on? And how are you going to continue those programs, initiatives or retain new hired after the funds run out?
Here are their responses:
“ESSER funding has allowed opportunities to provide for the safety of staff and students during the pandemic as well as expand services to students including core instruction and intervention services during the day, afterschool tutorial programming, and summer school programs. We continually monitor student learning outcomes and district goals to see how to prioritize budgets. When ESSER funds are no longer able to be used, we will need to evaluate how best to use other funding sources to accomplish meeting the needs of our students.”
“We are spending our ESSER allotment on additional staffing, technology infrastructure, and social workers. We will use this year to continue evaluating the staffing additions to verify the need for the permanency of the positions. Student impact data, staff perception data, and levels of state funding support will be used to make these determinations. If continued, staffing positions would shift to a general fund expense, which is fully impacted by yearly legislative decisions for supplemental state aid (SSA). Recent legislative decisions have increase SSA each year, but the increase has not matched inflation costs for school districts. This means districts must carve those inflation dollars out of other general fund needs, which staffing makes up approximately 80% of the general fund.”
“The pandemic did not create the academic gaps that exist today, but it did exacerbate and widen those gaps and further the need to provide support for those who lost out on too many learning opportunities during that time. ESSER funds are allowing us to accelerate plans to tackle those gaps in a way that meets our goals of greater educational equity for all students. Some specific uses of the funds have been on technology, a critical tool for teachers and students alike. This includes providing greater access to devices, improving connectivity, and expanding our virtual campus online school. We have also used federal funds to better meet the social and emotional learning needs of students, which contributes to their success and well-being both in and out of schools. Finally, ESSER funding has supported our operational work to make sure school buildings are healthy learning environments for our students, staff, and visitors. One example is that these funds helped with ventilation upgrades at several locations throughout the school district.”
“We used our ESSER funds to provide additional staffing for learning loss and to purchase technology for our PK-5 students.”
“We are required to allocate 20% of these funds for learning loss. To meet this requirement, we’ve held summer school, afterschool programming and offered tutoring services. In addition, we’ve ensured the cleanliness and safety of the building by ramping up routine cleaning. We are also planning projects that involve our HVAC systems to ensure clean air and air flow. Specific purposes have been outlined for the use of these funds and we probably have examples of use within each of those areas. These funds have been instrumental in helping school districts recover from what we’ve experienced the past few years. They’ve helped contribute to our desire to provide students a great school experience even in the middle of a health crisis.”
“In my first month, we have dedicated our ESSER funds to one-time expenditures. We purchased a larger capacity bus. We updated software for our camera system, and we took steps to improve our controls for our air handling systems.”
Are you noticing a trend here?
It seems clear that most of the new leadership around Des Moines has chosen to invest in traditional school improvement practices – tutoring, social/emotional programming, and building improvements – in order to spend current ESSER funding. And I’m guessing Des Moines isn’t alone as a metro area where these types of decisions are being made by school district leadership.
Only two of the new district leaders interviewed said they spent the federal money on some type of technology improvement. And even those two leaders said they focused mostly on purchasing devices, while one district worked on improving connectivity and expanding their virtual campus.
What happens if another wave of the pandemic hits our public schools later this year? What preparations have our traditional school districts taken to make sure their personnel is better trained to go virtual than they were the past two years?
From the interviews above, it seems like very little preparation has occurred.
And why it that?
Because very few of these districts have any interest in trying to do “learning” differently. Instead, almost all want to “double down” on what they consider to be tried and true practices that work.
But, here’s the deal. Those so-called tried and true practices haven’t worked – especially for most of our black, brown, and poor learners. So why do we continue to invest over and over in these practices?
It’s funny to me that not one of the new superintendents interviewed answered the question this way:
“We are using ESSER money to get better at making sure all our black, brown, and poor kids know how to read, and that their social and emotional needs are being met. We know that if our black, brown, and poor kids are well, then there’s a good chance all our kids are well. Also, we know we need to get better at out of school learning, in case we can’t be in school again, so we are using ESSER money to practice some action research and train our teachers, our students, and their families what out of school learning can look like for all involved.”
I wonder why no one answered that way?
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
Leave a comment