Early in the new year, the Albany County school district in Wyoming will convene a task force to conduct a “root cause analysis” of challenges high school students are facing on the road to graduation. Their findings might suggest the school district invest in new programs or scale back existing ones.
John Goldhardt, superintendent of the 3,900-student district, attributes the initiative to lessons learned from the ESSER era, when schools nationwide got almost $200 billion in emergency pandemic relief funds from the federal government.
With that much money at their disposal, it was more important than ever for district leaders to know precisely what was causing students to struggle, and whether efforts to improve the situation were making a difference.
“It does take energy and time. Sometimes you have to pay someone a stipend to come in and do the work,” Goldhardt said. “But if it means you’re going to get better results, then the investment is well worth it.”
The close attention to ensuring schools get their money’s worth from major investments is one of several ways that ESSER, which Congress supplied to schools in three rounds between 2020 and 2021, will continue to leave a mark on school finance strategy long after the few remaining dollars have dried up, district administrators say.
In some districts, new programs made possible for the first time by ESSER dollars will persist with new funding sources in the coming years, as school districts look to extend the contributions those programs are making to students’ test scores and well-being.
Other districts are grappling with how to apply insights and practices from the last few years to budget realities that are far less rosy.
The federal government appears poised to propose major cuts to its relatively small share of the nation’s overall K-12 school funding. State funding is constrained in some places by shrinking revenue, raging debates over competing priorities like private school choice, and the escalating trend of declining K-12 enrollment. And many districts lack a sufficient local tax base to overcome these bigger-picture challenges.
With financial pressures hitting schools from so many angles, district leaders will have to be creative and intentional in their efforts to prioritize programs and initiatives that have been most effective at supporting students.
“It’s going to take really deft management and good leadership to get through,” said Chuck Carpenter, chief of finance for the Denver school system.
Here are three ways ESSER and the pandemic have nudged districts to rethink budget priorities and refocus fiscal strategy.
1. Get input from educators who work directly with students
Most central offices craft budgets for the entire district, allocating resources to each school often without input from building-level administrators.
The Denver school district was already among a minority of U.S. school districts that have developed practices over the years of allowing principals to weigh in on the district’s budget decisions. ESSER helped strengthen that strategy, Carpenter said; the district gave principals a say in roughly half of the district’s overall allocation of federal relief money.
Some schools had a greater need for social workers, while others prioritized intervention teachers to provide supplemental instruction to small groups of students during the school day. Some principals opted to use the money to keep paying staff they otherwise might have had to lay off.
“We really let the people closest to kids make those decisions,” Carpenter said. “We weren’t trying to manage from the central office the needs of 150 different schools.”
A handful of districts nationwide, particularly in urban areas, have in recent years begun prioritizing a budget approach that involves more direct input from principals and school staff. But teachers and principals don’t always have a direct hand in shaping budget and purchasing decisions.
Forty-six percent of school and district leaders who answered an EdWeek Research Center survey earlier this year said communication between people responsible for teaching and learning and those responsible for budget and finance in their district was “functional"—sufficient for making basic decisions but not to develop “strategic resourcing.” Another 9 percent said the two groups are “completely siloed” and communicate rarely if ever.
Principals like having a more direct role in shaping the resources their constituents—students and staff—see every day, Carpenter said. And parents like it, too: It’s easier for them to communicate their needs to school principals than to try to get the attention of district officials, according to Carpenter.
2. Keep a running list of bucket-list priorities
Superintendents don’t regularly experience unexpected financial windfalls. As a result, Goldhardt said, some might be tempted to avoid thinking about possible improvements in order to avoid the disappointment that comes with not being able to bring them to fruition.
“We’re not used to being infused with money,” Goldhardt said. “This is my 36th year in the business. That just doesn’t happen.”
But opportunities do present themselves, whether they’re federal funds to help recover from a generational emergency, or new opportunities from grants or donations that pop up when least expected.
It’s important, district leaders said, to have a concrete sense of what the district would do with extra money ahead of time, rather than scrambling to pull together ideas once the opportunity has already arrived.
In Goldhardt’s district, ESSER funds helped pay for professional development on a scale that previously wasn’t feasible. The district invested in improving HVAC systems that had needed repairs for decades.
District leaders also prioritized an external program they’d long admired: a local nonprofit that provides safe shelter and counseling support for children experiencing homelessness who don’t have parents or guardians taking care of them.
“They have a really good record of kids finishing high school who probably wouldn’t have because they have nowhere to be,” Goldhardt said.
In Denver, some schools found success with certain technology tools for videoconferencing and personalized learning that they only started to use because the onset of the pandemic gave them no other choice. The district also created tutoring programs to help students prepare for standardized tests like the ACT.
For some districts, a bucket list might consist of maintenance projects deferred for decades, or after-school programs parents have long hoped to see.
“When you get money like that, you can try things that you wouldn’t have ordinarily tried,” Carpenter said.
3. Figure out what’s working, and build on that
In the Albany County district, new tutoring programs didn’t lead to student achievement gains as much as Goldhardt and his team expected. But the most powerful tutoring sessions, the district’s academic data showed, were those that happened during the school day, rather than after school.
This kind of effort to evaluate what’s working and what’s not with a particular program is more rare for school districts than it should be, Goldhardt said. Staff are often stretched too thin to actively track the success of programs as they play out.
“You get locked into inertia, then suddenly it’s been four years and we haven’t done a review,” Goldhardt said. ESSER reinforced a key point: “You have to continuously stay on top of it.”
That was necessary for ESSER investments in large part because district leaders knew in advance that they wouldn’t be able to maintain all of them once the funding came to an end.
In the Delran Township school district in New Jersey, ESSER dollars fueled expanded access to summer-school programming, more frequent mental health screeners for students, and high-impact tutoring services for students in every grade.
Now, with tighter margins, the district has no choice but to scale back, said Superintendent Linda Della Vecchia.
But those initiatives will stick around to some extent: high-impact tutoring will be reserved mainly for younger students, mental health services will be offered during the school year but not during the summer, and summer school will be geared toward students from low-income families.
Recent research has shown that ESSER investments made the biggest impact on achievement as measured by test scores when they fueled instructional investments and targeted students from poor families.
States would do well to learn from those findings, said David Knight, a professor of education finance at the University of Washington.
“If I’m a state legislator, I would be looking at ways to maintain effective programs in high-need school districts,” Knight said.
At the core of all these lessons is one that has been the research consensus for years: Money matters for schools, especially when spent the right way and on the students who need the most support.
“If I had my way, it would be an incredible idea to have such a fund given to schools with parameters [all the time],” Goldhardt said.
