What a Relief…: The district has received a grant to be used towards COVID-19 recovery

SMSD’s plan to spend a $10.5 million grant from the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act on educational technology, mental health services, addressing learning loss and other activities to maintain school board operations and services was approved by the Kansas State Department of Education earlier this month.

At the start of the pandemic, the Department of Education set up Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief — funds to help school districts recover from COVID-19 — through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. With each round of funding, districts will receive a grant, with the amount depending on their population, poverty levels and minimum threshold. Then, the district needs to fill out an approval form on where they will allocate the money and send it off to KSDE before they can spend it. There have been three installments of ESSER — the grant just approved for SMSD being the ESSER II.

“It’s fair to say that every single school district in the country was impacted differently,” ESSER task member and Coordinator for State and Federal Programs Dean Zijac said. “Even within school districts, students were impacted differently, there are pockets of individuals that were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic throughout the country and the size of those pockets may vary from district to district…but the pandemic just had an impact throughout the country on learning.”

For ESSER I, SMSD received $2,640,674 which went towards improving ventilation systems, internet hot spots, laptops and learning management systems, and ESSER III came out granting the district $23.7 million but is deciding on where to use the new funds.

In February of 2020, KSDE put together a task force — composed of 19 superintendents, legislators, teachers, school board members and business managers — to provide and assist schools in using the funds towards supporting student learning and needs associated with the pandemic. 

ESSER I came out in March 2020 to prevent, prepare and respond to COVID-19, and has since been followed up with ESSER II to continue with that objective as well as hire new staff and avoid layoffs. The task force plans to remain assembled until September 2024 — which is also the deadline for schools to use the money.

For the ESSER II funds, SMSD plans to use $2.3 million of the money for $600 retention bonuses to all district employees who returned for this school year. They’re planning to put the remaining funds towards technology needs, new hires and school-type specific budgets. For high schools, they’ve purchased programs like Educastic, Delta Math and PLC Institute and plan to purchase mental health professional learning and ELA intervention materials.

“[Health and wellbeing support] is a major issue, it is something that we spend a lot of our time working with here,” Principal Jason Peres said. “We do have two social workers on our counseling staff and then our teachers are all trained and we kind of all together wrap our arms around kids from a health and wellbeing standpoint.”

In addition to the goals of ESSER I and II, grants to school districts from ESSER III are required to have 20% of the grant go towards learning loss from COVID-19. This entails programs such as summer learning and enrichment, comprehensive after-school programs and extended school year programs.

“At the end of the day, for your given district, whichever sub-group that was the most impacted by the pandemic…[should be] at least for that 20%, really laser [focused] on supporting those special populations using evidence-based supports,” Zijac said.

Other than the one requirement of learning recovery, all schools in Kansas were sent a spreadsheet of 15 potential areas that the money could be used towards to decide where they needed funding and how much — to be sent to the state in the application. 60 of the 286 have submitted their applications, and SMSD is currently halfway through submitting their ESSER III application.

“We’re just beginning to review all of those, and as we review them they go to the board and get awarded out,” Zijac said. “As of now, we’re really only starting to get the ESSER III applications in. It’s open and districts can submit them as they’re ready, but because so many districts are really just now getting into their ESSER II funding, in terms of really spending it, I think that’s partially why there isn’t a big rush, from the district perspective, to get these applications turned into us because they’re still working through ESSER II.”

To decide on which areas to put the unallocated money from ESSER III, the district sent out a ThoughtExchange survey in December to parents, students, staff and community members to get their feedback. From the 2,000 survey responses, they found that the top concerns for the different populations were reducing class size for parents, mental health for students and retention payment for district employees and community members.

SMSD sent in the first half of their plan for the money to the task force for approval earlier this month and are finalizing the second half to be sent in. 

“School districts and just schools in general need funding to operate,” Peres said. “So, just like any business, we need to be able to bring in resources and people to serve students and that’s just not possible unless you get things like ESSER funding from the federal government to boost what we’re currently doing to support students better.”