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Colorado ESSER Report
Mancos starts summer camp with ESSER III funds
Posted 05/29/2024 - 2:45pm
A devastating tragedy rallied the small rural community of Mancos to offer a summer camp that gave students a needed outlet and teachers additional employment – thanks to $197,400 from ESSER III.
When two teenagers died by suicide in the summer of 2020 and 2021, the grief-stricken community came together with a sense of urgency for the summer months going forward. Teachers were burned out, and families didn’t have many care alternatives for their children.
“The board came to me and said … we're missing a key element to the well-being of our students,” said Todd Cordrey, Mancos School District superintendent. “My teachers were finding themselves exhausted with meeting those needs and also meeting the academic needs.”
The Expanded Learning Opportunities (ELO) grant from ESSER III enabled the district and the nonprofit Mancos United to put on the Summer Hub camp for 2023 and 2024. With the ELO grant, Mancos United and the school district partnered to provide a six-week camp that ran Monday through Thursday – from 7:30 a.m. until 5:30 p.m.
The program averaged 46 campers a day, ranging from incoming kindergartners to incoming eighth graders. In all 88 children participated in Summer Hub.
“We also did a couple of other things very intentionally that are different from most other summer camps and day camps,” Codrey said. “One was we paid our staff well. The teachers made $30 an hour, which is good for this rural community. And it attracted high quality. We had certified teachers as our staff.”
The icing on the cake was the camp was free. “You would see the family's eyes just pop when they found out that this was free. That was a huge deal.”
Amid the summertime fun and field trips, staff snuck in some learning objectives. An analysis later found a strong correlation for increased academic achievement between spring and fall tests for students who participated 20 days or more
To measure how successful the camp was, participating families were asked to rate on a scale of zero to 10 how stressful the summer was with the camp. The results were the “wow factor” for McClure. “Almost everybody picked zero, 1 or 3.”
Having unstressed parents means they are “better capable to be the parents they want to be for their kids. When the kids have healthy, regulated adults in their lives, then they can better regulate and be calm and handle the daily stress in school. That means they're better able and ready to learn and be regulated and contribute to the community. This, in turn, makes it easier for teachers to do their job.
It was a good investment, Cordrey said. “If Mancos United didn't exist, this would have either been an unmet need, or it would have been something the school district would have to do, and we simply do not have the expertise or the resources to do it.”
“This program took some of that pressure off, took some of the weight off our teachers’ shoulders,” he said.
Tags: ESSER III , Summer and Afterschool Programs , Use of Funds
St. Vrain Valley School District expands its P-Teach program to four rural districts
Posted 05/15/2024 - 9:39am
Thanks to a $2 million ESSER grant, St. Vrain Valley School District is expanding its P-Teach program that helps high schoolers get started on teaching careers in four rural school districts.
St. Vrain’s program started in 2019 and now has 150 high school students enrolled, enabling them to earn University of Colorado Denver credits. The expansion provides the program in Montezuma-Cortez RE-1, Las Animas, Cheraw 31 and Estes Park school districts.
“Why is there a teacher shortage?” asked Diane Lauer, St. Vrain’s chief academic officer. “We cannot point our fingers at the universities and say, ‘You're not doing your job.’ We're not doing our job. If we don't have a career pathway for teachers in our high schools, of course, we're not turning out teachers.”
The Expanded Learning Opportunity grant funded the teaching program and a summer Reading ReLaunch with students being hired as teaching apprentices at $12.56 an hour.
P-Teach was designed on the successful P-TECH model, which gives high school students a head start and an associate degree in areas like computer sciences. There were, however, some important tweaks, Lauer said.
“We knew that an associate's degree would not get you anything in the way of a teaching job because you typically need a bachelor's degree,” she said. “So instead of partnering with a two-year institution, we partnered with a four-year university because we wanted to have that alignment.”
Additionally, education credits can’t be transferred to other college subject areas, unlike in P-Tech.
Lauer said the district is “cautious about recruiting kids at ninth grade directly to go into the teacher pathway.” Instead, the district started with juniors and seniors. “And most of our students are now graduating with anywhere between 12 credits, or 14.” The credits are divided between the two upper-class years.
The first group of high school students started P-Teach in the spring of 2019. Six of those graduates have been hired back by the district, five of them as teachers, Curton said.
The rural schools started with 15 students in their P-Teach, with a goal of reaching 60. St. Vrain is looking into being able to offer some of its courses to other districts over Zoom.
Since the program began in 2022, Estes Park has committed to developing a teacher career pathway modeled on the St. Vrain program and other districts, such as Adams 12.
“We’re on a mission to fix this teacher shortage, and it has to happen one district at a time,” Lauer said.
Tags: ESSER Expanded Learning Opportunities , Use of Funds
Stedman afterschool program focuses on social-emotional skills
Posted 05/14/2024 - 1:31pm
Stedman Elementary School in Denver’s North Park Hill neighborhood used $50,000 from an ESSER grant to offer an afterschool program specifically for boys of color.
The funding from ESSER III paid for the Sims-Fayola Foundation’s Empowered Ambition Youth Development (EAYD) program, whose mission is to "improve the life outcomes of young men of color through direct programming and catalyzing systems change by addressing the root causes of educational inequities and institutional barriers."
The program “focuses on improving the social-emotional skills of young men. Also, it has components of mental and behavior, wellness, financial literacy, physical fitness, and some academic support around reading literacy,” said Dedrick Sims, Sims-Fayola’s chief executive officer.
“The whole goal is to help them to make better decisions around how to deal with conflict in their life, whether it's interpersonal conflict, or interpersonal conflict with someone else,” Sims said.
Michael Atkins, Stedman’s principal, has seen positive results from EAYD, which has been running for four years at the school, finding “it gives children an outlet to the world that they previously didn't have. Me. I was a little black kid who grew up in Park Hill in a lower socioeconomic environment, and I would have benefited so greatly from adults that look like me that were from where I'm from, who are promoting success.”
EAYD has served 16,000 young men in programs across the country.
“Our program has resulted in greater than 60% reduction in suspensions, truancies and negative discipline referrals that are associated with violence and physical contact,” Sims said. “And one way that we get those numbers is via achieving double-digit gains or increases in the social-emotional skills that we focus on with the boys.”
With ESSER grants ending September 2024, Sims said they will explore other funding sources. “We're always looking for funding.” The EAYD program is expected to continue at Stedman.
Tags: ESSER III , Summer and Afterschool Programs
Alamosa library creates summer learning program with ESSER funds
Posted 05/14/2024 - 1:00pm
Alamosa Public Library created a lively summer learning program in a city park thanks to a $78,000 ESSER grant that got students enthusiastic about reading.
The Expanding Learning Opportunity grant from ESSER III enabled the library to buy books, art supplies and sports equipment and cover some of the staff salaries. About eight students ranging in age from 8 to 18 regularly attended the four-day-a-week program in Zapata Historic Park.
Alamosa School District provided breakfasts and lunches, through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Summer Food Service Program, and staff came from the city’s Parks and Recreation Department and AmeriCorps.
The program had four goals: getting children to read for the sheer pleasure of it, increasing reading skills, creating a positive social environment and providing an opportunity to learn new creative skills, said Maria Kramer, library manager.
Each child got to select up to three books to take home – and keep if they wanted – every day. Almost all the children took all three.
“They don't have to worry about returning it. They can just keep it forever” Kramer said, adding that many people in the area don’t even have a library card.
The grandmother of one of the children, Azalea, said the girl “really liked the books she picked. She definitely would not have read as much over the summer without the program.”
The ESSER grant also enabled the library to hold two parent nights. In all, there were more than 200 discrete visits to the summer program by children and parents.
ESSER funding ends this fall, but Kramer is hoping to run “a shoestring version of the program” for next summer.
Tags: ESSER Expanded Learning Opportunities , Summer and Afterschool Programs
Fremont school district uses ESSER funds to fix a sick building
Posted 03/08/2024 - 3:57pm
The Fremont School District Re-2 had a sick building. A transfusion of ESSER funds cured it.
Working to keep the schools open during the pandemic, it became increasingly clear that the district’s oldest school building, Fremont Elementary, built in 1967, was not the healthiest place.
“It had the highest absentee rates with staff and students,” Superintendent Dr. Brenda Krage recalled. “We also knew that historically, air quality was not great in this building. But what COVID-19 (showed) us was that there was no quality air-filtration system. There was no intake and outtake system to keep the environment healthy.”
With ESSER funds available to provide cleaner air, Krage told the school board, “We have an opportunity to fix a historic issue.
Fremont received approximately $1.6 million that could be used to upgrade Fremont Elementary but that was not enough for the whole project. The entire $7 million project to retrofit the entire building with a new HVAC system was paid for with $3.8 million from CDE’s BEST program, $1.9 million from the general fund and $1.6 from ESSER funding.
The project wasn’t fast or easy. Construction began in the summer of 2022 with asbestos removal. That meant no staff were allowed in the building. Hallways were taped off. The ceiling tiles came down and old wiring was addressed. When classes began for the 2022-23 year, teachers were in the classrooms during the day and construction workers were in at night and on weekends and holidays.
Krage said she did not have “one single complaint about disruption to their classroom” despite teachers wanting to come in over Christmas and other breaks to get caught up on work. They couldn’t because the rooms were torn apart. “They just were like ‘Okay. We can do this. This is going to be a great benefit on the other side of this.’ And they were just real troopers.”
Krage has been with the district for six years. Before the new HVAC system was installed, during hot months she took popsicles at the end of the week to all the kids at Fremont Elementary. “Because it was so hot. They just endured the heat. Their little faces were so red, and they were just exhausted. That doesn't happen anymore.”
Instead, at the beginning of the 2023 school year in August, some of the children were wearing sweaters.
“It was such an undertaking that it just wasn't going to be dealt with until we had this opportunity with these kinds of funds. It's the rainbow that came out of a horrible situation.”
Tags: Air quality , ESSER II , Health and Safety , Use of Funds
Districts communicate about their ESSER funds with help from two nonprofits
Posted 02/14/2024 - 12:55pm
Adam Hartman, superintendent of the Cañon City School District, wanted to provide financial transparency so everyone in his small community could find out how the district was spending the $331,335 it received in federal pandemic Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding.
Hartman turned to two nonprofits – the Colorado School Finance Project and the Colorado Education Initiative – which received a combined total of $575,000 from ESSER III to finance the Learning and Transparency Technical Assistance Program to help districts like Cañon City to communicate how they were spending their ESSER funding.
“We want to get all the stories out there right to help the community understand where dollars went, how they were used, how they benefited students,” Susan Meek, CSFP program manager explained. As part of that effort, a webpage was created that captures where the dollars in every district went.
CSFP provides communication plans and toolkits to help smaller and mid-level districts without communications teams get the word out. The toolkit includes press release templates, newsletter and blog post templates, talking points and hints on social media. CSFP field managers coordinated and ran information sessions for districts on proper communication methods.
“They emphasized telling your own story,” Hartman said.
The Cañon City district, with approximately 3,500 students, was cited by CEI in its June 2023 progress report for its standout transparency performance.
Hartman flooded social media with videos and other social media posts and archived the detailed, positive messages to his superintendent's and district’s Facebook pages. Hartman also wrote a monthly article for a newspaper delivered to every mailbox with information on where the district’s ESSER dollars were spent. Additionally, he reserved time at every school board meeting to provide an ESSER spending report.
So where did Cañon City’s $331,335 in ESSER funding go?
“There were three phases,” Hartman explained. “The initial response, shoring up needs, then reaching out to individual schools to support their needs.”
To address the pandemic’s learning loss, summer school was expanded. K-5 parents who weren’t comfortable returning their children to the classroom received online learning programs. Additionally, air quality in buildings was improved. Water-bottle filling stations were added to drinking fountains to improve hygiene.
After students returned to school, everyone was wearing masks. Teachers were difficult to hear or understand. Cañon City turned to voice-lift amplification, a technology that distributes the speaker’s voice throughout the room loud enough for everyone to hear.
“Every classroom had teachers with mics around their necks,” Hartman said. “The amplification made things clear. Teachers manage their classrooms better with amplification.”
Teachers continued to wear the mics when the masks came off.
ESSER money also went to upgrading the skilled trades department equipment, including a new air compression system, lab equipment and a food truck with catering equipment.
Hartman says he believes his efforts to be transparent had a lasting effect. In November 2023, the district asked voters to approve a $13 million school construction bond necessary for the district to get an additional $23 million BEST grant to pay for new construction and upgrades. Would voters wonder why the district needed the additional money when it had already received hundreds of thousands in ESSER funds?
As it turned out, that wasn’t an issue. The bond passed 61.38% to 38.62%. “I hope that our transparency contributed to that vote,” Hartman said.
Tags: Allocations , ESSER III , Learning and Transparency Technical Assistance Program , Local Priorities , Use of Funds
ESSER III funding helps Center open child care for staff
Posted 02/06/2024 - 2:53pm
Child care was already a problem for the teachers and staff in Center Consolidated School District that was made worse when the pandemic hit, but fortunately, the school district found a solution with the aid of ESSER funding.
The tiny rural school district in the San Luis Valley has 600 students and used $175,000 of funding from the ESSER III direct LEA allocation along with additional district money to create the child care center for up to eight toddlers. The district is adding an infant care room to accommodate up to nine babies.
“We have a lot of young teachers and child care is definitely an issue,” said Center Superintendent Carrie Zimmerman. “Center is a really small community, so a lot of our staff commute.”
One of the first investments was hiring Lucia Miranda as the center’s director.
“She jumped right in and got all the furniture and all the equipment and stuff that we have to have in there,” Zimmerman said. ESSER funds help pay for changing tables, supplies, and playground equipment, as well as some salaries.
Currently, children from 1 to 3 years old are enrolled and attend from 7 a.m. to 4:45 p.m.
“We do teaching strategies,” Miranda said. “We do numbers, we do letters, and we normally do English and Spanish.” Additionally, the teachers talk to the children about their feelings.
“The older ones can say something like ‘I am sad today and they say why,’” Miranda said.
The district has about 130 staff members including 50 teachers and all are eligible to apply for child care. “That's an excellent recruiting tool and retention tool for us,” Zimmerman said.
“It's really awesome to go into the classroom,” Zimmerman said. “It just brings your heart joy and the kids are learning and they're learning through play.”
The third phase of ESSER funding ends this coming September and the district is preparing to maintain the child care center and shift to a new funding model.
“The staff do pay a small fee,” Zimmerman said. “We started at $150 a month and now we are up to $200. We do an automatic deduction out of their paychecks, which is extremely reasonable because child care costs in our area are upwards of $1,000 a month.
“We have built into our budget the maintenance of the program,” Zimmerman said. “The ESSER funds have been very, very helpful to the district. We were able to offset some salaries. Obviously, we're going to feel the impact of not receiving the funds, but we've been fiscally responsible with the funds that we've received and so our district is in good shape.”
Tags: ESSER III , Use of Funds
Money from the ESSER Rural Program Development helps West Grand CTE program
Posted 02/01/2024 - 4:39pm
A professional-grade espresso machine and an ice cream maker may not seem like educational tools, but with a $3,000 ESSER Rural Program Development grant, the West Grand School District has turned them into teaching machines.
West Grand’s money used the funding to bolster its Career and Technical Education classes, which were disrupted during the pandemic. Remote learning was no substitute for the hands-on learning the program provides.
West Grand School District 1-JT in Kremmling with fewer than 400 students received funding from the $141,000 rural pandemic aid grant program to update equipment and supplies for the CTE program, splitting the funding between the food science and business classes.
The food science supplies included items to teach about canning, processing meat into sausage and jerky and how to make homemade yogurts and cheeses.
In the food science program, students learn where food comes from, how we make it and all about food safety.
“We got some ice cream makers so the kids could learn how to make ice cream and sorbets,” said Emmylou Harmon, math/science/vocational teacher and district health coordinator. Added to all this was a fryer for the chicken parting labs and a dehydrator for making jerky and fruit leather.
And that professional-grade espresso machine? The business students’ club, Future Business Leaders of America , is using the espresso machine to upgrade student skills and the drinks they sell.
FBLA runs a school store/coffee shop called the Mustang Market. The machine meant “they could sell espresso drinks in their coffee shop versus just selling coffee and hot chocolate,” said Jennifer Hooks, West Grand High School principal. “It makes all the same types of espresso drinks that you could get from a coffee shop.
The market is both an internal fundraiser and a way for the students to learn how to run a business, Hooks said.
“They make all the menus,” she said. “They make all the pricing. They do all of the accounting for the business and budgeting and ordering. Every class period, they rotate students who run it, and then those students are kind of rotated out every week. In this way, everybody gets the opportunity to go in there and make the coffee, and collect the money.”
The shop, which also sells a variety of snacks, is not open during breakfast time or the lunch hour. The district food service provides free food during those times.
However, “Kids are allowed to get a pass from their teacher to go to the coffee shop and get something and come back to class,” Hooks said.
Not surprisingly, the espresso drinks are a hit for students and faculty.
Tags: Local Priorities , Rural Program Development , Use of Funds
Mapleton uses ESSER funds for transformative leadership program
Posted 01/30/2024 - 9:17am
One goal for ESSER was to help students get up to speed and improve learning once schools reopened. The partnership with UVA, Crawford said, gave teachers strategies to help students catch up.
“It's figuring out which kids are behind and why. Learning data planning for interventions,” he said
When the pandemic hit, Mapleton Public Schools hesitated to move forward with a plan to move forward with a transformative initiative to rethink conditions for school success and school leadership through the University of Virginia’s Partnership for Leadership in Education program. Instead of postponing the project, ESSER funding enabled district leaders to expand it, which has improved learning and school ratings in the district.
“We sort of had a moment of thinking, maybe it's not the time to start this partnership,” said Michael Crawford, senior deputy superintendent. “Maybe we'll have to wait until we can be in person. We decided not to do that. …We went ahead with that partnership. And we used COVID relief money to fund that.”
While the original plan was to focus on the district’s central management and high school, funding from the ESSER II and ESSER III direct LEA allocation, enabled the program – Project Lift: Leveraging Instruction for Transformation – to be brought to every school in the district.
“We were able to really leverage that learning to be more of a ‘thought partner’ with the University of Virginia and with other districts across the nation,” said Mapleton Superintendent Charlotte Ciancio. “I felt like it was serendipitous almost, that we were able to, to use the money that was available through ESSER to really go deep to support our local community.”
The district covers 25 square miles around Thorton and north Denver with 20 schools and 7,000 students.
Mapleton’s Project LIFT relied on a program developed by UVA’s Darden School of Business and the School of Education and Development that is being used by about a dozen school districts around the country.
The ability to collaborate and share experiences not only with the UVA team but with educators in those districts – from Long Beach, California, to Cleveland to Baltimore – was a bonus of the program.
“Those collaborative conversations and that collaborative opportunity really gave us a skill set to analyze data differently,” Ciancio said. “To think about what our kids are showing us they know. And because they're no longer necessarily all sitting in front of us in the classroom, how do we really pay attention to what it is they're learning? It forced us to really think about learning in a different way.”
The university program – Partnership for Leaders in Education – has four key focuses or levers: leadership, talent management, support and accountability and instructional infrastructure.
“Everything that we're planning, from our executive team to our school teams, happens in those categories and those levers,” Crawford said. This gave them “a common way to talk about it and talk about how it's going across the district.”
For example, using the instructional infrastructure lever, the district implemented new interim assessments for students and leadership teams and planned ongoing professional development for teachers. That work is beginning to make a difference in terms of student learning, Crawford said.
The district’s state accreditation performance also improved. Schools are ranked in five steps from a low of “turnaround” to a high of “distinction.”
“We had a couple of schools that were more on Priority Improvement, which is really right before Turnaround,” Ciancio said. “It's not great. It's not a great space to be in. Now, the majority of our schools have reached a higher performance level.”
The state’s accountability system factors in student performance on statewide tests, growth and post-secondary measures such as graduation rate and dropout rates for its School Performance Framework, coming up with cumulative points. All but two of the Mapleton schools earned more points even if they did not move up to a higher rank, Crawford said.
“So, I think that is one measure of what we've done has helped us be on the right track, especially through some pretty difficult times,” he said.
Another sign of improvement came from an evaluation and accreditation by Cognia Global Commission, a nonprofit organization that conducts external reviews of school systems across more than 90 countries.
“More importantly, in my opinion, than the state accreditation …,” Ciancio said, “is the engagement in the actual learning process for children, and a community and the teaching staff at schools.”
How has the learning process changed?
“What you might see is more project work, where kids are working on problem-solving,” Crawford said.” There might even be more conversation student-to-student in classrooms, but it's productive, you know, instructional conversation.”
Ciancio said, “When we walk into classrooms, we see very different behaviors from our students than we used to see. We hear very different teaching approaches than we used to hear. We see the results of student work that are very different than what we used to observe.”
Tags: Local Priorities , Use of Funds
Districts use ESSER funds for reading contest
Posted 12/18/2023 - 3:57pm
Reading isn’t usually considered a competitive sport, but elementary school students in three southeast Colorado school districts waged a pitched Battle of the Books with the help of an ESSER Rural Program Development Grant.
Students from Wiley, Rocky Ford and Cheraw school districts recently squared off in a quiz-show-style contest, quarterbacked by Santa Fe Trail Board of Cooperative Education Services Assistant Director Natalie Brown.
Santa Fe Trail BOCES, Wiley and Cheraw each received a $3,000 award from the grant program, which seeks to re-engage students after their pandemic-forced timeout from the classroom.
Santa Fe BOCES – which provides educational services to seven school districts – had already been awarded money to address math. When it came to reading, Brown said, “We decided that it needed to be something that was new, something that we had not tried before.”
And that proved to be the Battle of the Books – an age-old competition between school districts in which students compete against each other using their understanding of selected books.
Brown was familiar with the game, having used it in other districts. When she floated the idea to the school districts, the response was incredibly positive.
“I can tell you about these little, small school districts, one of the things that cracks me up is the competition is huge,” she said. “They love competing against each other.”
They loved the idea of something that would get their kids reading again, and not only reading but reading for a purpose. Students would compete within their own districts, and then move on to compete regionally.
All three districts that signed up are small, with Wiley having one school and 262 students, Cheraw with one school and 224 students and Rocky Ford with three schools and 676 students.
In all, 141 students participated from the three districts. Teams were given 36 books to read, though not everyone on each team had to read each book. They then faced off against each other in a quiz show format. The questions started with “In which book” and the correct answer is the title and author of the referenced book.
In all, 288 books were purchased with others coming in on loans from libraries.
The titles ranged from Beverly Cleary’s “Ralph S. Mouse” for readers 8 to 12 to the first in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, written for 13- to 18-year-olds, even though the competitors were in third, fourth and fifth grades.
Brown said they were pushing the students to read books above their grade level. “I’m going to give you some hard books, but I believe in you.” she told students. “I believe that you can read these books.”
The Wiley team teacher, Shae Krentz, told her third-to-fifth-grade students that if they knew “you're going to be working with someone, try not to read the same books. Try to read different ones. And get to know the basic premises. What it’s about. Where it’s set. Background of the characters, you know, just those basics and then they read in-depth and still try to smooth it out amongst the team members.”
Krentz explained that this approach “allows those kids that have a really good memory but maybe struggle with reading, to be able to still contribute to the team.” Having been a junior and senior high cheerleading coach for 19 years, she appreciates the value of teamwork.
Mara Romero, dean of students/gifted and talented coordinator for the Jefferson Intermediate School in Rocky Ford, took a different approach.
“I ended up with about 24 kids total that participated, and they read six or seven books apiece.
Then I would have them just write a summary of that book,” Romero said. “I rewarded them every time they completed a book. They were able to get a prize, which was a full-size candy bar.”
So, how does Battle of the Books work? Imagine teams at their tables. Each team gets the opportunity to answer a question. Wrong Answer? Another team can buzz in for a steal! And if the team steals and they get it right, they get the points. If they get it wrong, the question basically becomes dead. And then you proceed on to the next question.
The winning teams, with a total of 19 contestants, proceeded through districts to regionals, which was held at Otero College. More than 100 were in the audience, people the contestants knew, some they didn’t, all oohing and ahhing at correct answers. Cheering and clapping as if they were at a Nuggets game.
In the end, Wiley prevailed, claiming the trophy that will travel from winner to winner in future years. The team also got a jar of cookies. Actually, all the teams got jars of cookies.
There was so much enthusiasm generated by Battle of the Books, the districts have said that even without ESSER funds, they will find ways to finance another competition. "Even the district superintendents were excited. At a superintendents’ meeting they were, I don’t know how to say this, they were talking smack about how well their kids were going to do,” Brown said.
Tags: ESSER III , Rural Program Development
Edison School District uses ESSER funds to repurpose school bus
Posted 11/27/2023 - 12:56pm
Students in Edison School District No. 54 are learning industrial arts skills to repurpose an old school bus into a habitable home using ESSER funds that were available to rural school districts for strengthening student engagement.
The tiny 112-student school district in Yoder was one of 47 Colorado rural school districts that applied for money from the $141,000 Rural Program Development grant.
Edison received $3,000, which the district used to purchase tools and supplies for Jason Golding’s industrial arts class and its unique project to turn an old school bus into a “skoolie” – a bus converted into a tiny house.
Students in Golding’s class will get hands-on experience in electrical, fabrication and plumbing. Experience that could translate into work after graduation. The program is only just in the beginning phases, said Superintendent Dave Eastin.
“These kids,” Eastin said, “are going to get plumbing expertise . . . electrical expertise. They’ll get everything across the board as far as the trade skills.”
Eastin said, “The grant really helped us kind of push this from a planning idea to start implementing it.” It helped “push us over the hump” he said, with additional assistance from the FFA. (Before 1988, the organization was known as the Future Farmers of America.)
With only three students to work on the bus, progress has been slow, and it will probably take a few years to complete. So far, they’ve been working on pulling out the seats. Work in earnest will begin early next year.
The project falls into the school’s career technical education program with an FFA, career and technical education teachers. Golding’s students, by all accounts, are enjoying the work, Eastin said, and understand it can be part of the bigger idea, the bigger plan.
The aim is to get the community more involved since there are many in the area who work in the trades or could provide learning experience outside of the classroom. Eastin feels that once more progress has been made on the skoolie, it will be easier to get more people interested and willing to lend a hand.
The plan is to finish off the skoolie and sell it. Refurbished school buses listed on skoolielivin.com in Colorado have run the gamut from $22,500 to $125,000.
Any profits would go back into the program, Eastin said. “And possibly help us set up some type of apprenticeship and internship . . . maybe turn out another tiny home type of deal and see where that goes.”
“I don't believe that college is the only route,” Eastin said, “.. I believe there's a lot of different avenues for kids to go.”
He feels the skoolie refurbishing “gives kids skills that I think are amazing. And to get that one-on-one attention with as small as we are . . . it's irreplaceable”
Tags: Local Priorities , Rural Program Development , Use of Funds
A detailed look at the Donors Choose campaign
Posted 11/09/2023 - 10:19am
A high school teacher in Arvada replaced his 40-year-old generator, enabling students to deep-learn the concepts of electricity.
A Denver K-3 teacher received hands-on materials so his students could conduct magnetic field experiments.
Thornton high-schoolers now have phospholipid and membrane transport kits so they can study how cells organize.
Specifically, CDE in August gave $11 million from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund for nearly 14,000 classroom projects in more than 1,500 schools. The next month, Gov. Jared Polis provided $6.3 million in Governor Emergency Education Relief funding and CDE added $400,000 in ESSER funding for more than 7,000 projects in more than 1,300 schools. Each approved teacher request was eligible for up to $1,000 in total project funding.
Here are some results:
Campaign 1
On Aug. 24, 2023, CDE announced the first initiative to provide public school teachers with $11 million in COVID relief funding for classroom projects. Funding had been fully allocated by Sept. 1.
The first campaign funded 13,979 projects in 1,576 schools
Of those schools, two-fifths had 50% or more students from low-income households.
The top subjects were literacy and language, life skills and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math)
Schools getting funds:
- 40.9% urban
- 35.6% suburban
- 7.7% town
- 9.9% rural
- 6% unclassified
How funds were divvied up:
- 27.2% educational games and kits
- 14.9% books
- 14.7% flexible seating
- 10.1% instructional technology
- 8.2% classroom basics
- 6.7% art supplies
- 5.5% computers and tablets
- 5.1% lab equipment
Campaign 2
On Sept. 21, Gov. Jared Polis announced an allocation of $6.3 million from the Governor Emergency Education Relief fund for public school teachers for classroom projects. CDE added an additional $400,000 for this campaign, which was fully allocated within a few days.
The second campaign funded 7,368 projects in 1,385 schools
(Of those schools, 41.7% had 50% or more students from low-income households.)
The top subjects were literacy and language, life skills and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math)
Schools getting funds:
- 38.7% urban
- 37.2% suburban
- 7.4% town
- 10.9% rural
- 5.8% unclassified
How funds were divvied up
- 28,5% educational games and kits
- 13.7% flexible seating
- 11.2% books
- 10.3% instructional technology
- 8.4% classroom basics
- 7% art supplies
- 6.4% computers and tablets
- 5.1% lab equipment
Teacher Appreciation
Here’s some feedback from teachers whose projects were fully funded.
From Mr. Bluhm, the Arvada high school teacher who replaced his 40-year-old generator:
“Thanks for selecting my project. The Van De Graaff Generator is really fun and makes electricity come to life for the students at Arvada West High School! … Students love to interact with this product. It makes concepts in electricity more impactful with deeper learning!”
From Mrs. Lavigne, Grades PreK-2, Fort Collins:
“My students are loving all the new materials that they get to engage with! The kids are liking all the new sensory boxes they get to find their articulation minis in as well as language minis. They love all the new literacy manipulatives that keep them engaged in listening to the stories and then having visual supports to answer comprehension questions.”
From Mrs. Di Stasio, Grades PreK-2, Pueblo West
“Due to the COVID-19 pandemic students and teachers experienced many uncertainties. This printer and supplies has allowed me to attend to my student and families needs by being able to print newsletters, individualized reading passages, art projects and so much more right from my very own classroom. Classroom costs are so often covered by teacher's own money – right out of our own pockets without a second thought. This donation has been so beneficial to me and my students and is greatly appreciated.”
From Ms. Vanek, Grades 3-5, Broomfield:
“Thank you for funding our classroom grant for wobble stools. Flexible seating helps students to focus. These wobble stools will give students the opportunity to move their bodies while still being a part of the classroom and staying engaged in learning. The flexible seating will help to support my diverse group of students as they grow and learn.”
Tags: Allocations , Use of Funds
Second round of DonorsChoose funding goes quickly
Posted 09/29/2023 - 1:20pm
More than 9,800 teachers had their projects approved in the second round of funding of the DonorsChoose campaign that only lasted three days.
On Thursday, Sept. 21, Gov. Jared Polis announced his office would contribute $6.7 million from the Governor's Emergency Education Relief fund to the DonorsChoose program, which provided $1,000 to teachers for classroom supplies and resources to improve students’ learning experiences. The Colorado Department of Education contributed an additional $440,000 to the second round of funding.
Teachers from around the state applied for the $7.1 million, and the campaign funding had been fully applied by Sunday, Sept. 24. DonorsChoose officials say it may be the fastest campaigns in its history.
In August, CDE contributed $11 million in federal COVID-19 relief funding to the DonorsChoose campaign. That first round of funding had been fully spent in just over a week with nearly 13,000 teachers obtaining classroom resources to address pandemic learning loss. DonorsChoose is a 501(c)(3) charitable non-profit organization that facilitated the campaign.
In both campaigns, Colorado public school teachers were able to apply and receive up to $1,000 in project funding, which included about $800 in materials after fees and other costs.
For teachers who were too late or whose project didn’t get funded, your project will remain posted on the DonorsChoose website and is available for any DonorsChoose donor to support. Officials at DonorsChoose say about 70% of projects that are posted ultimately get funded.
Tags: Allocations , Use of Funds
Gov. Polis provides more funding for DonorsChoose
Posted 09/21/2023 - 3:30pm
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis today announced additional funding for Colorado teachers to access the DonorsChoose Program funding. This opportunity was created by the Governor’s allocation of $6.7 million from the Governor's Emergency Education Relief (GEER) fund to the DonorsChoose program which provides $1,000 to teachers for classroom supplies and resources to improve students’ learning experiences. This investment builds on the extremely successful collaboration between the Colorado Department of Education and the DonorsChoose program in August , where CDE provided $11 million in federal COVID-19 recovery funding to the program.
The DonorsChoose Program supports teachers to purchase new resources and supplies that will help students excel in the classroom. With some students working to get back on track following the pandemic, it is crucial teachers can access the resources they need to address unique learning challenges. Any PreK-12th grade Colorado public school teacher can submit project requests to the DonorsChoose program site, and eligible projects receive $1,000 while the funds last. Eligible uses of project funding include upgrading or purchasing:
- Classroom supplies
- Technology learning tools
- Instructional materials
- Social or mental health resources for students
Teachers who have previously received funding from this program are able to submit a new project request and access additional funding.
Through CDE’s previous investment, DonorsChoose provided $1,000 to more than 2,300 Colorado teachers. The tremendous interest from teachers across the state resulted in all available funding being distributed in just eight days. The additional state funding created a second opportunity for Colorado teachers to submit project requests and take advantage of the program. Teachers can submit their project requests beginning today, Sept. 21, 2023, through Sept. 28, 2023, or until funds are fully allocated.
Teachers can create an account and submit their project requests by visiting: https://help.donorschoose.org/hc/en-us/articles/16813215491095
Tags: Local Priorities , Use of Funds
Initiative that used ESSER funds for classroom supplies a rousing success
Posted 09/08/2023 - 4:09pm
Nearly 13,000 Colorado teachers applied for and received more than $11 million in classroom supplies in an initiative that used ESSER II funding to help pre-K through 12th grade public school educators address COVID-19 learning loss.
The Colorado Department of Education partnered with DonorsChoose, a 501(c)(3) charitable non-profit, to empower educators to secure specific classroom supplies they need to support their students’ academic success as they continue to recover from learning loss associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Colorado teachers received up to $1,000 in project funding from CDE, which included about $800 in materials after fees and other costs.
Beginning Aug. 24, teachers applied through the DonorsChoose portal with a description of the project, up to about $800 in supplies, and a description of how the items would help with student recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. A DonorsChoose team vetted the requests and excluded projects with items that were ineligible for ESSER funding including clothing, food, subscriptions, gift cards, or other items not related to student academic or social-emotional needs- and then approved. Items were shipped to the school almost immediately after approval. A total of 1,553 schools were supported and 167 of 178 Colorado school districts had at least one project funded. A breakdown of the statistics of the initiative can be found here.
“We are so happy that we were able to tap into federal COVID relief funds to provide teachers with supplies that are critical to helping students recover from the effects of the pandemic,” said Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova. “Teachers were able to ask for exactly the supplies they needed and nearly every one of the projects were fulfilled. This is the kind of initiative that has a real tangible effect.”
Tags: ESSER II , Local Priorities , Use of Funds
ESSER funds used for summer enrichment in Mancos
Posted 07/13/2023 - 3:24pm
Parents from Mancos used to have to endure a 56-mile round trip to Durango for their kids to make it to summer enrichment programs, but thanks to a $73,900 grant from CDE’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund , a new program for K-8 students has started up in their town. Read more about Mancos' Summer Hub featured in the Colorado Sun.
Tags: ESSER Expanded Learning Opportunities
Chief of Staff Scott Jones delivers update on CDE’s ESSER fund rollout to the Board of Education
Posted 06/27/2023 - 1:50pm
Colorado school districts have been able to provide more after-school programs, summer learning opportunities and focused studies on math and literacy thanks to $1.8 billion the state received in ESSER funding, according to Scott Jones, CDE's chief of staff.
Jones provided a detailed presentation to the Colorado State Board of Education at its June meeting , providing an update on the funding from the federal government provided to address pandemic learning needs and enhance statewide education. The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, known as ESSER, was launched in March 2020 to help schools and districts that were struggling during the early stages of the pandemic.
Ninety percent of ESSER, or $1.6 billion, was directly given to districts for them to use at their discretion to respond to the pandemic and recover from lost learning opportunities. ESSER I addressed critical needs at the onset of COVID-19 and helped schools transition to remote learning, ESSER II emphasized a safe return to school through facility improvements and learning loss coverage, while ESSER III, the largest portion, has been directed to address learning losses through summer, after school programs, and more. All three phases have also helped provide mental health support to districts to combat upward trends in youth and adolescent issues.
Next, Jones briefed the board on how the state used $180 million in directly controlled funds to support learning throughout Colorado, including $22 million for Rural Coaction , a program to provide students with career-connected learning. The program is funded out of the ESSER III state reserve.
“One of the most popular and most talked about programs that we implemented was the Rural Coaction program,” Jones said. “We allocated, originally, $15 million, but the popularity was so high for this and there was so much demand that we were able to do some reallocation and increase this to $22 million focused on how do we provide rural districts with the opportunity to collaboratively build career connected learning and not have to recreate the wheel in every district.”
Other projects funded by the Department of Education directly included $21 million in evidence-based programs for before and after school learning and $8 million for kindergarten through eighth grade mathematics and kindergarten through third grade READ Act curricula. To address teacher recruitment, CDE created an alternative licensure program designed to keep AmeriCorps tutors in the profession. To improve teacher retention statewide, the department created a peer mentoring program for teachers who began their careers during the pandemic and did not get the same level of support as their colleagues had in years past.
Jones next brought attention to ESSER programs still in development, saying, “We still have a couple programs that are still in the pipeline, one is around professional learning, specifically in mathematics. We want to provide additional professional funding resources to math teachers to help [improve] instructional practice and accelerate learning for students.” He elaborated on an upcoming teacher support initiative by stating, “We know that teachers have borne a great burden during the pandemic and every classroom has its own particular needs and so we are working on developing a program that would provide direct funding of small grants to address the academic needs of their classroom.”
Lastly, the Chief of Staff brought attention to the department’s stringent use of these funds and was proud to report it had only returned 0.045% of its allocated ESSER I funds to the federal government at the September 2022 deadline. ESSER II will expire this September and is also on track to be fully expended, while ESSER III funds are able to be used until September 2024.
Click here to view a video recording of the presentation . The next Board of Education meeting is Wednesday, Aug 16, 2023.
Tags: American Rescue Plan (ARP) , ESSER I , ESSER II , ESSER III , Rural Coaction Program
Holyoke uses ESSER money to focus on mental health needs
Posted 06/22/2023 - 12:53pm
A $100,000 Education Workforce Grant enabled Holyoke School District in northeast Colorado to hire an additional counselor during the 2022-23 school year to help students and teachers in need of mental health support in the wake of the stress caused by the pandemic.
The Education Workforce Grant , funded through the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2021 (ESSER II), was established to ensure “educators, leaders and support staff are in place and supported as they offer programs to provide in-person learning, address learning loss, complete unfinished learning and meet the COVID-related needs of Colorado students.”
Holyoke School District covers about 540 square miles in the northeast corner of Colorado near the Nebraska border and serves about 600 students. Because the small agricultural community has limited mental health resources, Superintendent Kyle Stumpf knew the district needed to play a larger role in meeting the mental health needs of students and teachers.
“We realized that our teachers, who were holding it together so much for the kids and putting up a big front, really needed some of their own mental health needs taken care of,” Stumpf said. “And so during COVID, I was actually paying for opportunities for my teachers to go get full counseling sessions in a nearby town, but they had to travel 25 to 35 miles away.”
Travel time was also a barrier for busy parents to take their kids to regular counseling appointments in Sterling, a nearly one-hour drive from Holyoke.
Stumpf said the district has seriously considered providing a virtual therapy option, but he feels that, “it’s really hard to build a rapport with kids, especially those vulnerable kids, through a screen.”
With the grant funding in place, Stumpf was ready to hire a counselor to focus on the social emotional needs of students and teachers. But after the job posting had been up for six months without a single applicant, Stumpf reached out to a counselor who had previously worked for the district to see if she could help.
In September 2022, Kathleen Kropp returned to continue working with several students with the highest need for ongoing support and began to work with teachers as well. She spent one day a week at both the elementary school and high school. Kropp, a licensed professional counselor, was able to focus on in-depth therapy sessions because she didn’t have additional duties like academic counseling.
During and after the height of the pandemic, “people felt more able to say I'm not doing okay,” Kropp said.
In her view, the pandemic made it more acceptable to talk about mental health and helped people realize they could seek help for issues they may not have in the past. That’s one of the silver linings of the pandemic because everyone can benefit from learning skills to communicate and better manage their feelings, she said.
Kropp and Stumpf emphasized the importance of relationships in the mental health of students. One way the district has measured students’ well-being has been to track the number of trusted adults children have in their lives.
"Six years ago, we did a survey and we had our kids saying they had one, maybe two, trusted adults, and our last survey said they have seven or eight trusted adults,” Stumpf said.
Teachers are often among the trusted adults in students’ lives but are not able to meet all the social emotional needs of each student, he said.
“We put a lot on our teachers,” Stumpf said, “We really pride ourselves on our teachers asking questions and listening and then getting the student to the right person that can meet their needs. So they don't have to be a full time counselor. They don't have to have all the right words. They just have to be able to listen and to know how to get them to the right person who can help them so it's not another adult that has dropped the ball or another adult that just dismissed them.”
Similarly, Kropp said the success of counseling is determined by the relationship between the counselor and the individual seeking help. She works within the framework of each relationship to teach new skills to help participants change problematic thoughts and behaviors. Some of the skills she helped students and teachers develop are communication, setting boundaries, relaxation and mindfulness.
“I feel like as a district, we're good at asking the questions, and then looking at the results and problem solving,” Kropp said. “We have a really positive administration and board when it comes to mental health. I'm just very thankful because that's definitely not always the case."
Tags: Education Workforce Program , ESSER II , Mental Health Needs
Mathematics education grant boosts rural teacher development with ESSER III funds
Posted 06/16/2023 - 11:01am
The Colorado Department of Education is using $125,000 of federally allocated ESSER III funds to plan and deliver professional development opportunities for math teachers in the San Luis Valley.
As part of a statewide push to improve math education in all districts, CDE has used these funds to create the Regional Math Professional Development Grant, which will cover costs for teachers in the region to attend professional development events this month and to create similar events in the San Luis Valley next year. The main purpose of the grant is to provide stipends for teacher leaders to plan, develop and deliver professional development to colleagues at a region-wide professional development event in January 2024.
Veronica Starcher, CDE’s specialist for the Office of Learning Supports and former music teacher in the San Luis Valley, spoke to her personal experiences with professional development when she worked in the Monte Vista Public School District, as well as the challenges seen by educators in the region.
“The San Luis Valley has 14 ferociously independent school districts all serving very similar communities,” Starcher said. “They’re all very connected to personnel, but when it comes to systems and communications there’s not so much.”
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted education in a multitude of ways, including professional development for teachers. In the early days of the pandemic, education budgets throughout the state were repurposed to address immediate needs, and professional development opportunities were canceled or moved online. As a result, some Colorado teachers are under-developed or under-experienced compared to pre-pandemic benchmarks.
Mathematics teachers are difficult to retain statewide, and development opportunities remain more limited in rural areas, highlighting the need to develop regional teacher-leaders for these programs.
Grant recipients will travel to Denver for the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics Summer Leadership Academy and Colorado Council of Teachers of Mathematics Learning Institute late this month. Funds from the program are to be used for travel, lodging and supplies. The Regional Math Professional Development Grant will reduce financial barriers associated with attending these important conferences and improve teacher quality and education methods in rural districts.
Starcher pointed out that oftentimes educators incur costs out of their own pockets to attend conferences on the Front Range. Rather than continuing to have teachers attend seminars and workshops in other communities, she saw an opportunity to serve instructors locally.
“How can we support a region, especially with teacher professional development so we can get the student outcomes we desire,” Starcher said. “And we know that, especially after COVID, professional development stopped at Pueblo. If we wanted professional development in the valley, we had to go to Pueblo.”
The grant also includes stipends for teacher leaders to plan, develop and deliver professional development to colleagues at a region-wide professional development event in January 2024.
Tags: ESSER III , Rural Program Development , Use of Funds
Poudre School District diversifies staff with Education Workforce Grant
Posted 06/09/2023 - 10:27am
Poudre School District in Fort Collins spent $100,000 from an Education Workforce Grant to diversify its workforce while at the same time attempting to fill more open positions than the district had in pre-pandemic years.
The majority of the grant paid for a full-time bilingual recruiter with the rest allowing the district to implement an intentional recruitment strategy to increase the number of teachers, which didn’t used to be a problem for the district before the pandemic.
The Education Workforce Grant, funded through the American Rescue Plan's Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Act, was established to ensure “educators, leaders and support staff are in place and supported as they offer programs to provide in-person learning, address learning loss, complete unfinished learning and meet the COVID-related needs of Colorado students.”
Prior to the pandemic, Poudre School District didn’t need to seek out qualified candidates. The district's reputation as an employer of choice, combined with the city’s high ranking on many best-places-to-live lists, made recruitment relatively effortless.
“We haven't put a lot of money and investment into (recruitment) because we didn't have to,” said Deborah Meyer, director of talent acquisition and retention at Poudre School District. Teachers “were waiting at our door when we were ready for them. When we tried to open that door (after the pandemic) and they weren't there, we had to be a little bit more creative.”
The COVID-19 pandemic brought about an 80% decrease in applications at the district. From 2020 to 2023 there were consistently about 60 open positions ranging from support staff like paraprofessionals and bus drivers to teachers and administrators.
“Instead of just screening, we needed to go out and find these people,” Meyer said. “A lot of what the grant was written around was, again, not doing this post-and-pray method but really being proactive in our strategy, and in order to be proactive in a strategy you have to have staff and bandwidth and budget to do so.”
The district has focused on seeking out and hiring people from more diverse backgrounds, a challenge in Fort Collins, which is about 85% White. A significant gap exists between the demographics of teachers and students in the district. Only about 9% of teachers are people of color compared to 24% of students.
Employing more people from diverse backgrounds, “not only enriches our students, but it also enriches the overall retention and culture of our organization because we're continually learning how to work with each other, and ultimately, how to best serve our students,” Meyer said.
Since hiring a dedicated bilingual recruiter in November 2022, Poudre School District has been able to extend its in-person recruitment efforts to Hispanic-serving institutions and historically Black colleges and universities, broadening the potential candidate pool.
By purchasing subscriptions to platforms like DiversityJobs.com, the district can automatically post job openings to numerous diversity-focused sites to attract a wider pool of applicants. They also purchased ads on platforms like DIVERSITY in Ed and traditional media.
So far the approach is working. By April 2023 the district had hired 67 new staff members from various racial and ethnic backgrounds, increasing diversity among the classified staff population by more than 3%.
Another way the district is diversifying its workforce is by hiring teachers from outside the United States through the J-1 Visa Exchange Visitor Program . These teachers are highly qualified with at least a Bachelor’s degree and three years of teaching experience in their home country. The J-1 Visa allows them to teach in the United States for three to five years.
Poudre School District will have 10 exchange program teachers on staff for the 2023-24 school year. The district focused on bringing teachers from Spanish-speaking countries like Mexico, Colombia and Peru to support its dual-language immersion schools and it also has teachers coming from the Philippines and Jamaica.
The district’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Coordinator, Delhia Mahaney, sees great promise in the district’s new approach to hiring.
“The Talent Team in PSD has worked exceptionally hard to diversify our workforce,” Mahaney said. “We have a long way to go, but our path forward is bright!”
Tags: Allocations , Education Workforce Program , ESSER II , Use of Funds
Jeffco uses $1.5 million in ESSER III funds for mental health services for students
Posted 05/12/2023 - 10:36am
Jefferson County Public Schools is providing free mental health services for students at 155 schools throughout the county with about $1.5 million from the district’s third round of ESSER funds.
To provide the services, Jeffco is partnering with Hazel Health , a physical and mental telehealth provider, to help students develop coping skills, learn how to self-regulate and increase their resilience.
The money for the program came from the third round of ESSER funding, which was created when the American Rescue Plan was signed into law on March 11, 2021. Under ARP ESSER III, Colorado was allocated $1.2 billion to support safely reopening schools and to address the many impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on students. Jeffco received $68 million from ESSER III funding.
“Mental health issues really started to be further fueled by the pandemic,” said Drew Mathias, Hazel Health’s vice president of marketing and communications. “We were identifying through physical health services these underlying conditions that were early warning signs of mental health issues.”
In May 2021, Children’s Hospital declared a youth mental health “state of emergency ,” an announcement that detailed how the chronic stress of pandemic disruption had led to burnout and hopelessness in adolescents. Jeffco officials point to the increased numbers of behavioral events and in-school suspensions between the current school year and the 2021-22 school year as evidence of an increasing mental health crisis.
“If they're not coming to school in an optimal headset, it really limits what they're going to learn throughout the day. So, we truly believe that whatever we can do to support our kids to be in a space where they can accept learning, and it's our obligation to do that.” said Terry Walderman, executive director of student services at Jeffco Public Schools .
Hazel’s services are intended to be short term and the company works with community partners to address students’ long-term needs. Walderman especially appreciates the company’s commitment to working with students until they can obtain long-term care.
“They have committed to not ending a student's services if they need more. So if they need an outside provider and there's still a three-month wait on that provider, Hazel will continue for three additional months until that person can actually be handed off,” she said.
During the first six weeks of the program, 465 students from 102 Jeffco schools were referred for counseling and 157 appointments had been completed.
Currently, students can access telehealth services from home with a parent or guardian in the hours before or after school, and Jeffco is exploring offering access to telehealth services during the school day. The district would leave it up to the principal of each school to decide if they can provide a private space and someone to supervise.
Although routines and schedules have mostly returned to normal since the COVID-19 pandemic began, students continue to need support overcoming the effects of prolonged isolation and uncertainty during their developmental years.
“There's so much skill building that needs to happen and again, those pieces of self-regulation, self-management, resilience, learning to work with and through frustration, having to continue to be a learner when you really just want to go outside and play,” Walderman said. “There’s so much these poor kids have to have to negotiate.”
Tags: ESSER III , Mental Health Needs , Use of Funds
Colorado's Katy Anthes explains how COVID relief funds are making an impact
Posted 05/11/2023 - 10:07am
The Council of Chief State School Officers asked state education chiefs how COVID relief funds had made an impact on their state. Colorado Education Commissioner Katy Anthes explains in this video how she learned of the funds' effectiveness when a school leadership team extolled the funds and how they have helped align math standards to math curriculum for the first time.
Tags: American Rescue Plan (ARP) , Use of Funds
DPS uses high-impact tutoring grant to spur improvement
Posted 05/05/2023 - 3:13pm
A $2 million ESSER grant is funding high-impact tutoring in Denver Public Schools that is resulting in higher-than-expected growth on students’ statewide assessments.
“We weren't looking for just scores. We were also looking at their confidence level, their engagement level, you know. And right now, all the data is pretty promising.” Susan Cheng, a program manager on the Expanded Academic Learning team at DPS
For the 2021-22 school year, DPS contracted with the vendor Cignition to provide virtual math tutoring for 1,069 students in fourth through eighth grade. An example of how the tutoring is working – at the end of the year 82% of participating students with IEPs achieved greater growth than expected on their annual state assessments tests.
The district also hired University Instructors to pilot a literacy tutoring program for kindergarten through eighth graders.
The Colorado High-Impact Tutoring Program was created in 2021, when the Colorado legislature passed House Bill 21-1234 (PDF) , providing nearly $5 million a year for grants to be given to schools in the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years. Additionally, the Colorado State Board of Education allocated additional ESSER funding to expand the reach of the state program during the first two years.
Among the criteria for the high-impact tutoring grant, learning groups must consist of no more than four students that meet at least three times a week during the regular school day, the tutor must be highly qualified and the curricula must be of a high standard.
If high-impact tutoring is done correctly, learning can increase by as much as 15 months in a year’s time, according to a report on the first year of grant funding for High-Impact Tutoring in Colorado schools . This approach “has consistently yielded a significant positive impact on students from all backgrounds, including students furthest from opportunity,” the report says.
For each school, the district considered how many students are English language learners, African American/Black, Hispanic/Latinx, experiencing homelessness, receiving free and reduced lunch, and receiving special education services.
Cignition provides virtual tutoring in math to third through eighth graders in 21 schools. University Instructors provides in-person early literacy tutoring to kindergarten through third graders in 18 schools.
Connor Hatton, program coordinator at University Instructors, said the students who do well in the small tutoring groups also tend to do well in class.
“These are really confidence-building sessions, as well,” he said. “You know, finding the confidence to make mistakes and to learn. That's definitely something that when we are training our tutors and our instructors, we emphasize that we want them taking the confidence that they're gaining in our groups and carrying it into the classroom.”
Another Program Coordinator at University Instructors, Robert Rizzacasa, gave an example of the progress he observed in one small group. At the beginning of the school year, some of the students were reluctant to read and would argue over whose turn it was to read aloud. In April he observed the same group reading together.
“And by the end of the session, they had to leave to go to recess. And one of the girls in the group was just like, ‘I don't want to go to recess. I want to stay here and read with you.’” Rizzacasa said. “They were enjoying reading so much together and just the rapport that they built with our instructor.”
Tags: ESSER III , High-Impact Tutoring Program
Afterschool theater program uses ESSER funding
Posted 04/26/2023 - 2:45pm
Theatre SilCo in Silverthorne, formerly Lake Dillon Theatre Company, is filling an urgent need for after-school care in Summit County with $528,432 in grant funding from the ESSER III Expanded Learning Opportunities Grant Program.
The free dual-language VIVO After School Theatre program is available to all elementary-age students in Summit County at Dillon Valley, Silverthorne and Summit Cove Elementary schools with space reserved for families with the most need. Currently, the program serves 120 students, 105 of whom attend daily.
“Without this program, there isn’t another option for after-school care for families in Summit County and many families would be forced to make tough decisions about their future in our beautiful community,” according to the grant application.
The idea for the VIVO program was born when Summit County approached the theater and other community organizations for help with the childcare crisis.
“We're not a childcare center, so we can't provide licensed childcare. But we have theater so we can provide that at no cost, thanks to the grant,” said Sara Rodriguez, program manager at Theatre SilCo. In addition to the funding provided by the ESSER Expanded Learning Opportunities grant, the program is also funded by Summit County and another state agency.
Theatre SilCo began the program in January 2022 with two teaching artists at Silverthorne Elementary and filled to capacity the first week. This school year the program has grown to three schools with eight teaching artists who provide a safe place for learning new skills, community building and social emotional growth.
In addition to filling a great need, another program goal is to give students a place to belong and build relationships after prolonged online learning took a toll on the mental health of the youth in Summit County. The Summit Daily News reported in February 2021 that children and adolescents in the area were experiencing an increase in anxiety and depression.
Teaching artists at VIVO work toward creating an emotionally safe and supportive environment, especially for students who are still building a sense of identity. Parents often share that their children have found a sense of belonging in the program that they haven’t had anywhere else.
“A lot of the benefits of theater are not necessarily for the art form itself. We're not necessarily trying to create a bunch of theater artists. It's great if we do, but it's really getting at things like teamwork and discipline and accountability,” Rodriguez said.
The success of the program is based on the development of life skills, rather than evaluations of performances. Through a wide variety of theater-based activities, teaching artists focus on building skills the students will need to thrive throughout their lives including self-confidence, teamwork, cultural awareness, accountability, creativity, curiosity, critical thinking, problem-solving, self-expression and public speaking.
The spectrum of what’s involved in theater is much wider than performing on a stage, Rodriguez said. Activities in the after-school program include puppet shows, games, playwriting, lighting and sound design and stage management. The hope is that students have fun without realizing how much they’re learning and developing new skills.
“All of a sudden, when you look at someone doing a scene, or giving a presentation in school, you'll start thinking, ‘Wait, I'm going to have to write that, and someone has to memorize it.’ So someone had to create the visual aids or the prop that fits the scene, and someone has to decide, ‘Well, where are they going to be? What are they going to wear?’ Developmentally, it's really fascinating to see these kids after a few months.” Rodriguez said.
Sometimes the students discover a new appreciation of the arts. Rodriguez was surprised by the insightfulness of one student’s answer when a teaching artist asked the group what dance does for the theater.
“This little kid, who had been in the program for a few months and knew nothing about theater when they started, said ‘Well, I guess because sometimes words aren't enough.’”
Tags: ESSER Expanded Learning Opportunities , ESSER III , Summer and Afterschool Programs , Use of Funds
High Impact Tutoring Grant improves student performance at Fort Collins charter school
Posted 04/24/2023 - 9:34am
A grant that has allowed AXIS International Academy in Fort Collins to hire college students as tutors has helped 91% percent of students in the program improve their math skills in just one year, according to school officials.
AXIS International, a multilingual charter school, in 2021 received a $48,000 high-impact tutoring grant – which comes from House Bill 21-1234’s legislation that created the High Impact Tutoring Program to provide nearly $5 million a year for grants to be given to schools in the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years. The Colorado State Board of Education also allocated a total $7 million in funding to support these grants over the same period.
“Obviously the pandemic … made a significant impact on some of the most vulnerable students in our learning community,” said Chen Hong, operations and program consultant at AXIS. “We want to support those students in catching up quickly, and we thought the program was a great opportunity to be able to provide targeted, high-quality tutoring to our disadvantaged students, and also enable them to overcome those challenges that they face.”
To be eligible for the grant, schools must keep individual learning groups small with no more than four students who meet at least three times a week during the regular school day. Additionally, the tutor must be highly qualified and the curricula must be of a high standard.
If high-impact tutoring is done correctly, learning can increase by as much as 15 months in a year’s time, according to a report on the first year of grant funding for High-Impact Tutoring in Colorado schools . This approach “has consistently yielded a significant positive impact on students from all backgrounds, including students furthest from opportunity,” the report says.
At AXIS International Academy , students are immersed in a dual-language experience. They study literacy, math and core knowledge for half of the school day in either Spanish, French or Mandarin and in English for the second half of the day.
During the 2021-22 school year, 48 AXIS students who were at risk of falling behind participated in high-impact tutoring for math. All participants were either learning English as a second language or were eligible to receive free and reduced-cost lunch - an indicator of poverty.
The charter school hired seven students from the foreign language department at Colorado State University as tutors, who worked with students for 30 minutes a day, four days per week, using the Math in Focus curriculum.
Hong described the partnership as a win-win. “It was a huge success because all of the CSU tutors have experience with a second language at CSU, so they are such an asset when they come into our building because all of our kids are learning second language,” she said.
Brenna Freer started tutoring at AXIS while she was finishing her degree in Economics and International Development at CSU. She has since graduated and now works as a substitute teacher at the school. She related to the students easily and empathized with them about how the pandemic disrupted their learning and social experiences.
At first, one student wouldn’t talk to Freer at all. She was shy but also hesitant to speak English because it wasn’t her first language.
Freer connected with her by emphasizing that they are both learning. She said to the student, “Hey, I am learning Spanish. You can tell because you know the language better than me. And you are learning math. Let's work together and teach each other.”
Eventually, the student opened up and by the end of the school year she had become more confident and engaged in learning. Freer hopes her influence helped foster a positive relationship with learning that will continue beyond elementary school.
Hong appreciates the support she’s received from the Colorado Department of Education to implement high-impact tutoring. Through regular meetings and communication, CDE provided valuable resources and ideas on different ways to execute the program.
“CDE has provided lots of flexibility and support to ensure that we are able to maximize our resources and run the programs more efficiently,” Hong said. “So, that was very helpful.”
AXIS continues to try new approaches within the high-impact tutoring model to create the most effective program possible for their students. This school year AXIS was granted $79,200 and hired two full-time bilingual interventionists who are focusing on English literacy. Next year the school plans to try a combination model with both on-staff interventionists and CSU tutors working with students on math and English skills.
Freer said it was especially rewarding to hear that one of the struggling students she worked with who is now in sixth grade is taking a seventh-grade math class.
“She not only caught up but excelled and so that was pretty exciting to hear,” she said. “I felt like I was able to make a real difference.”
Tags: High-Impact Tutoring Program
Kwiyagat Community Academy gets tutoring help thanks to ESSER grant
Posted 04/10/2023 - 11:27am
Kwiyagat Community Academy, the first Colorado charter school on an American Indian reservation, is using $55,000 from the state’s High-Impact Tutoring Grant to help students in populations most affected by the pandemic recover from devastating learning loss.
The Kwiyagat Community Academy , located in Towaoc, the capital of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe on the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation in far southwestern Colorado, opened in the fall of 2021 with kindergartners and first-graders and is growing grade by grade every year until it has a full kindergarten through fifth-grade program.
The grant, which is part of Colorado’s state reserve fund from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief fund, supports the school’s high-impact tutoring program that brings in qualified tutors with a mission of improving students' reading skills. The program has so far shown promising results. By the end of the 2021-22 school year, 89% of students who participated in the tutoring program showed academic growth.
“You can see a big difference,” said Jessica Magie, a tutor who works at KCA and another charter school in Cortez.
Among the criteria for the high-impact tutoring grant, learning groups must consist of no more than four students that meet at least three times a week during the regular school day, the tutor must be highly qualified and the curricula must be of a high standard.
This approach “has consistently yielded a significant positive impact on students from all backgrounds, including students furthest from opportunity,” according to a report on the first year of grant funding for High-Impact Tutoring in Colorado schools . If high-impact tutoring is done correctly, learning can increase by as much as 15 months in a year’s time, the report says.
In 2021, the Colorado legislature passed House Bill 21-1234 (PDF) creating the Colorado High-Impact Tutoring Program, which provided nearly $5 million a year for grants to be given to schools in the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years. The Colorado State Board of Education also allocated a total $7 million in funding to support these grants over the same period.
Kwiyagat Community Academy envisions “a future where the graduates of the school will have a strong grounding in Nuchiu culture and language while incorporating modern perspectives as contributing members of the Ute Mountain Ute community.” Building the students’ literacy skills is essential to achieving this vision.
Principal Danny Porter said the High-Impact Tutoring Grant allows him to hire top-talent retirees that he otherwise couldn’t because of Public Employees’ Retirement Association requirements. That’s a huge benefit in a rural area where it can be difficult to attract qualified teachers.
One of the tutors at Kwiyagat is a retired principal who not only provides direct instruction to the students she’s tutoring but also mentors teachers who are brand new to the profession. By hiring her, “I'm getting double my money's worth,” Porter said.
“Another thing I like about this tutoring grant is it gives me a lot of opportunities to be flexible with the people I hire as far as their hours,” he said. “I will take an excellent teacher for a shorter amount of time, you know?”
In one example, tutor Jessica Magie uses the multisensory Orton-Gillingham approach with small groups of students during the school day, fitting it in while teachers are working with other small groups. She engages her students with sight, sound and touch.
Students write the letter of the sound they hear in a container of sand so they not only learn the sound but get a tactile experience to further hardwire the concept.
Magie can see that her efforts are working. This year, a first grader was really struggling at the beginning of the school year, “barely coming in with letters and sounds.” And then “right after Christmas time he's reading and it just blows us all away.”
“He's asking to take home, not just little books, but full-on passages. And I would have never ever guessed that last year … He's got a special spot in my heart right now. He is just flying,” Magie said. “It always happens where you're working and you're working so hard, and then all of a sudden, all those things that you've been trying to pull together, come together.”
Porter sees the work educators are doing at Kwiyagat Community Academy as a step toward addressing historic inequities. He hopes that the Ute Mountain Ute students will be able to imagine more possibilities for their own lives because they’ve been able to learn from people that share their culture.
“You want kids to see people like them and the possibilities,” he said. “Be able to stand up and argue your point of view, be able to get your point of view in written form. Be proud of who you are and be able to carry on a logical argument.”
Tags: ESSER III , High-Impact Tutoring Program , State Reserve , Use of Funds
ESSER III grant helps support St. Vrain's Project Launch summer program
Posted 04/03/2023 - 12:46pm
Project Launch , a full-day summer program that is a collaboration between St. Vrain Valley Schools and four rural districts, is using a $2 million Expanded Learning Opportunities grant from ESSER III to expand the program over the next two years.
“We were grant awardees for two years under the governor's RISE grant. We really saw some tremendous, tremendous gains,” said Diane Lauer, assistant superintendent of priority programs and academic support at St. Vrain Valley School District. “That helped us to really know that our design was effective. And so being able to access the ELO funds is very exciting because it gives us two more years to continue to advance learning for our students.”
The program was originally designed in the St. Vrain Valley district and in 2022 expanded to four rural partner districts—Montezuma-Cortez, Cheraw, Las Animas and Estes Park. Most participating schools have Title I status.
A total of 780 rising kindergarten through fifth-grade students across the districts will be identified for the program and recruited for free participation in the four-week full-day program this coming summer. Each day students will have 45 minutes of structured literacy intervention, 120 minutes of language arts, 120 minutes of STEM activities and 60 minutes of music or physical education. The schools also will host several events over the term to help families create a literacy-rich home environment.
“We consulted the research, and really looked at some other programs that were showing an impact,” Lauer said. “Previously, we had a half-day program. And what we found in the research is that a full day program is really going to maximize the student learning.”
Collaboration with other school districts has boosted the program’s success. For example, St. Vrain shared with its partner schools that it was using Heggerty phonemic awareness materials in addition to other READ Act -aligned materials. When teachers at other schools tried the same approach, they were amazed by how well the students were learning.
Testing confirmed that the approach was effective. In 2021, Las Animas students increased their ability to break words into their individual sounds by 14% by the end of the four weeks. In the second year, the increase was 57%.
Project Launch program also employs high-school students interested in a teaching career. This coming summer, each program site will have two to five teacher apprentices with a focus on first-generation, bilingual, and/or bicultural students.
“We're all looking for ways to inspire that next generation of educators,” Lauer said. “And what better way to do that, than to find some high school students who could have a workplace learning teaching experience, so we hired them as paraprofessionals.”
Giselle Caraveo Dominguez, a senior at Skyline High School in Longmont, worked as a paraprofessional last year and plans to repeat the experience this summer. Through St. Vrain Valley’s Pathways to Teaching program, also known as P-TEACH, she gained field experience during the school year, shadowing teachers for about an hour at a time.
Working for Project Launch gave her a full-day classroom experience for the first time. She gained confidence in her teaching ability and confirmed that teaching is the right career path for her. Building relationships with teacher mentors has also helped her navigate the college enrollment process.
“I'm a first-generation student. I'm the first one in my family to go to college,” Caraveo Dominguez said. “So P-TEACH really helped me go through those steps.”
Lauer suspects the summer program helped one of the partner schools, Rocky Mountain Elementary in Longmont, become the only school to win both the Governor’s All School Bright Spot Award and the Governor’s Math Bright Spot Award this school year. The awards are given to schools that showed exceptional academic improvement during the pandemic.
Although Project Launch is a summer program, the idea is for teachers to continue to use the same evidence-based strategies throughout the school year.
“We know that this approach works,” Lauer said, adding that over the next two years, “We're going to show that impact, and we're absolutely open and interested in collaborating with anyone else who's interested in this model.”
Tags: Allocations , ESSER Expanded Learning Opportunities , ESSER III , Summer and Afterschool Programs , Use of Funds
Rural Coaction grant helps to collaboratively build and expand student pathway opportunities
Posted 03/21/2023 - 2:50pm
Rural school districts in Colorado are being seen as a big part of the solution when it comes to the coming labor shortage that is being predicted in a wide variety of employment areas, including construction, education, health care, hospitality and transportation.
As a way to address this issue, the Colorado State Board of Education earmarked $22.4 million of its ESSER III funding for a Rural Coaction Grant that is helping 17 coalitions of districts and BOCES – representing an estimated 50,573 rural students – to collaboratively build and expand student pathway opportunities, career-connected learning and career partnership programs in rural areas.
Among those, Northeast Colorado BOCES received $2 million and Ignacio School District in southwestern Colorado received $1.99 million from the grant.
Northeastern Colorado BOCES uses grant to implement vision
“Our school districts are using Rural Coaction funds to implement programs they’ve wanted to implement for their students for years, but limited resources have made it so that they’ve not been able to do so,” said Tamara Durbin, executive director of the Northeast Colorado BOCES. “All of our schools are small, our socio-economic status is low, and our biggest challenge is distance, since our schools are often very far apart. We’re addressing all of this through the Rural Coaction funding.”
Northeast Colorado BOCES includes 12 school districts – Akron, Buffalo, Frenchman, Haxtun, Holyoke, Julesburg, Lone Star, Otis, Plateau, Revere, Yuma, and Wray – and the combined number of high school students is about 1,500.
“The goal is for each student to be college- or career-ready upon graduation from high school, and so we are offering concurrent enrollment for those pursuing college, and also support for students to acquire a trade or industry certificate,” she said.
“My feeling about Rural Coaction is that we’re changing lives,” Durbin said. “This grant has allowed us to really provide opportunities for students that they didn’t have, but also that they maybe didn’t even know about to begin with. It’s just the right thing to do, and it feels really good to be able to do so much more than we could before. Not to mention that we’ll be filling a truly dire need for skilled labor in the next few years.”
The $2 million has helped to pay for additional teachers, as well as materials and equipment so that each district can implement its vision, Durbin said.
For instance, Akron and Plateau school districts have created construction programs, with Akron also offering welding. Julesburg offers science, technology, engineering and math STEM courses in its Destination Career Academy Direct pathway, along with online career courses remotely in health fields and criminal justice.
“What’s great about the Julesburg program is that they’re reaching out to students in other districts, and so if someone in a different district wants to get industry certification in, say, phlebotomy, they can just pay the course fee to participate, so it’s really opening up doors,” Durbin said.
“The Rural Coaction money is also helping some students to pay for laptops or class fees, which is sometimes a huge barrier for our students,” she said. “This is a really big deal, for so many to have this kind of access.”
Meanwhile, funding from the grant helped Holyoke School District implement a Homegrown Talent Initiative in partnership with the Colorado Education Initiative and Colorado Succeeds, focused on preparing students for careers in agriculture and business. The goal, Durbin explained, is for the other 11 districts to be able to access the HTI resources, as well, allowing for job shadows and internships for the students interested in those fields.
“Our partnerships with our community colleges, Northeastern Junior College and Morgan Community College, have also been vital in helping us make concurrent enrollments work, too,” she added, sharing that there are about 360 students enrolled in the concurrent enrollment track. “These programs also give our students the ability to learn more about a chosen field and decide if it’s something they want to pursue further.”
Ignacio School District partners with Southwest Colorado Education Collaborative
Creating career pathways is also a primary objective for Ignacio School District in southwestern Colorado, which received $1.99 million from the Rural Coaction Grant that will serve 5,300 students.
“Ignacio is serving as the fiscal agent for the work that is being carried out by the collaborative,” said Jessica Morrison, executive director of the nonprofit Southwest Colorado Education Collaborative . “The collaborative already had two pathways in place, targeting the industries of building trades and the environment, and so we’re using the structure that we built for career pathways and are sharing capacity resources. The next two pathways will be education and the sciences.”
SCEC launched a series called Building Our Shared Future, events that bring together K-12 students, educators from higher ed and members of the targeted industries to collaboratively determine what the needs are within the career and college pathways.
“We’re looking at issues like, what is the equipment that needs to be purchased, what are the skills that students need to learn to engage in those pathways, and what are the certifications and concurrent enrollment courses that are stackable?” Morrison said.
“We’re building this through participatory community engagement across the entire region. In the spring, we’ll be helping school districts with program approvals, determining what courses need to be offered next fall so that all students have access, and then we’ll deal with the procurement of equipment, followed by soft launches of the work-based learning opportunities, including job shadowing and summer programming. That’s our first year of Rural Coaction.”
The second year will drill down deeper, she said.
“We’ll be looking at, OK, we have equipment, and we have students in this career and college pathway, and have built a strong Level One, now how do we push into Level Two and Three with internships, what refinement is needed?” Morrison said.
In addition to the two pathways, the nonprofit also is creating a regional work-based learning database system that will be a “one-stop shop to connect them all in one location,” she added.
“Industry is feeling tapped out and overwhelmed by requests, so the idea of having this database will provide one system for industry to know what they’re getting in terms of things like student engagement and how they’re going to access that,” Morrison said.
For now, Ignacio’s grant money has gone primarily to staff time and the implementation of events in the southwest region, but some day-to-day application has also begun. For instance, Ignacio’s woodshop classes have begun to design equipment that will travel in a storage container from school to school to serve students in the trade programs.
“What I love about this grant is that I get to see kids working with people who are very much entrenched in the industries, and so the kids are making connections right away,” said Ignacio’s Superintendent Chris deKay. “They’ll come out with a three- or four-year certificates in the field they’re interested in, but they’ll also have made connections already with the people who could hire them.”
DeKay adds that in an ideal world, juniors and seniors in Ignacio would have been working in trades that interest them from their freshman years on, giving them years of practical experience that would make them imminently hirable.
“Over the course of time, I really think that there's potential for something amazing, you know, as far as serving kids are walking out of school with the skills they need to do,” deKay said.
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ESSER funds provide teachers with summer learning CoLabs
Posted 03/17/2023 - 10:16am
The Colorado Department of Education is using $125,000 in ESSER funding to pay for a summer learning series for teachers called CoLabs that will be offered in June in Grand Junction, Greeley and Pueblo.
CoLabs are one-day professional development conferences where teachers from all grade levels attend breakout sessions on multiple content areas such as English language arts, math, physical education and science. Sessions are led by faculty from institutions of higher education, experts from professional teaching organizations and CDE staff. Teachers who attend get free lunch and can earn PD credits.
“The purpose of this is to try to make this as useful to teachers as possible,” said Samantha Messier, director of CDE’s Standards and Instructional Support team, which developed and organized the CoLabs. “Part of what makes this special is it brings professional learning to districts that are outside of the Denver area.”
Last year, more than 300 teachers representing more than 40 school districts attended the three summer sessions.
Teachers surveyed after the events say the experience was very useful and the learning could be applied to their everyday classroom work. This year, there will be sessions on math, English language arts, social studies, computer science, science and P.E. but will also have sessions focused on the social and emotional well-being of educators.
“One of the exciting parts is the opportunity to better serve elementary school teachers,” said Raymond Johnson, mathematics content specialist with CDE. “CoLabs gives them the opportunity to go to several sessions in one place. They can go to a literacy session, an arts session, a math session. It’s all under one roof.”
Last year content experts from several Colorado professional teaching organizations presented, including the Colorado Association of Science Teachers, the Colorado Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the Society of Health and Physical Educators and the Colorado Language Arts Society.
The ESSER funds help reimburse travel expenses for some of the presenters including keynote speakers.
Here is the schedule for this June:
- Thursday, June 1: Grand Junction, hosted by Colorado Mesa University
- Wednesday, June 14: Greeley, hosted by the University of Northern Colorado
- Friday, June 23: Pueblo, hosted by CSU Pueblo
For general questions and answers about Teaching and Learning CoLabs, contact Samantha Messier at messier_s@cde.state.co.us , director of CDE's Office of Standards and Instructional Support.
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Denver summer arts and culture program gets help from ESSER grant
Posted 03/13/2023 - 8:26am
The Summer Arts & Culture Camp at Museo de las Americas , a program for low-income youth in downtown Denver for the past 13 years, has a waiting list 20 to 30 students every year, which is why organizers hope that pandemic funding through a CDE grant will help make the program more accessible.
Museo de las Americas focuses on mitigating summer learning loss and building social and emotional skills by immersing students in the culture of a Latin American country. The art-based curriculum incorporates the academic subjects of science, language arts and social studies while fostering self-esteem and encouraging creativity in at-risk youth.
“They're not just doing arts and crafts,” said Sean Trujillo, program manager at Museo de las Americas. “They’re doing actual school learning activities that'll help stimulate their brains and their minds in the summertime.”
Museo de las Americas received $31,130 from the Expanded Learning Opportunities grant from ESSER III to help grow their program over the next three years. The plan is to increase attendance and offer more scholarships to families.
Carina Bañuelos-Harrison saw a new level of self-confidence in her 6-year-old daughter, Valentina, and 10-year-old son, Iker, during the end-of-the-session final performance. When she saw her son, who has autism, playing the drums she thought, “Who is that?” She was delighted.
“I've never even seen him be interested in a musical instrument or to even look as confident as he did. It just showed us that he very much enjoyed it,” Bañuelos-Harrison said. “Seeing my children have such a good time is all I think a parent could ask for.”
Although the summer camp is open to all on a first-come, first-serve basis, 90% of applicants are from the surrounding neighborhoods. Museo de las Americas’ neighborhood, La Alma/Lincoln Park of Denver, was identified by the 2021 Child Well-Being Index as a lower opportunity neighborhood because most of its residents live below the poverty line.
Roughly two-thirds of camp participants received scholarships last year. The ELO grant will enable the museum to provide scholarships for all students, allowing some to participate who might otherwise be unable.
Engaging with mentors from similar cultural backgrounds and building friendships with peers from different schools can have a long-lasting impact on children’s lives. It’s valuable for the kids to have these experiences that last a lifetime, even if they don’t realize it at the time, Trujillo said.
“One of the most valuable assets is being a culturally diverse and educational camp for the students,” he said. “We get so many different students and so many different parents from all different backgrounds.”
An important goal of the program is to create a safe space where kids can feel comfortable and supported. Bilingual instructors help create a welcoming environment for students, many of whom speak Spanish at home or attend dual-language schools.
Staff members and volunteers also try to understand and accommodate students’ individual needs.
“If you see somebody lonely, or if you see a student that needs a little bit more attention, then let's get them that,” Trujillo said.
The 2021 Summer Arts & Culture Camp’s theme was Ancient Mexico. Bañuelos-Harrison’s children were two of 45 students who received scholarships to attend. She appreciated that her kids could learn about their Mexican heritage in the educational setting of a museum. “It's helpful to kind of tie in with the things that we talk about at home,” she said.
She was also grateful that her kids could be themselves at camp. She initially worried about how Iker’s autism might impact his experience at camp but found that staff were receptive to learning how best to work with him.
“It's not very apparent from the exterior that my son has autism,” Bañuelos-Harrison said. Museo staff told her that getting to know Iker expanded their knowledge of what autism can look like. “So I think there was a lot of cross learning and education, not just with my kids at Museo, but also my kids teaching Museo.”
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South Central BOCES to expand student pathways with Rural Coaction Grant
Posted 03/06/2023 - 9:55am
For many urban school districts, students are able to tap into state-of-the-art career technical facilities such as St. Vrain Valley School District’s Innovation Center and Cherry Creek School District’s Innovation Campus.
But most of Colorado’s school districts are in rural areas, where access to such programs is limited. This is particularly vexing for rural areas where labor shortages are growing every year, particularly in the teaching field. The COVID-19 pandemic made the labor shortage problem even worse.
That is why the Colorado Board of Education directed $22.4 million in federal pandemic aid to a program called the Rural Coaction Grant to help districts and BOCES collaboratively build and expand student pathway opportunities, career-connected learning and career partnership programs in rural areas.
South Central BOCES is among the 17 grantees for the Rural Coaction Grant.
Led by former CDE Director of Field Services Denille LePlatt, South Central BOCES is patterning its program after a successful rural Texas model.
“We knew it was something that we needed to do for quite a few years, but we just didn't really have the funding, and then when the state had set aside this ESSER III funding, we needed to figure out how we were going to utilize that,” LePlatt said. “Some of my colleagues and I took a trip down to South Texas and looked at the Rural Schools Innovation Zone. We came back with a dollar figure, and I wrote up a proposal for coaction to ask the state board for the money to support a career-connected learning program for rural districts throughout the state.”
Texas’ Rural Schools Innovation Zone calls itself a “sustainable collaborative to provide rural students high-quality opportunities for postsecondary success,” which is exactly the intention of the South Central BOCES Rural Coaction plan, LePlatt said.
Ultimately, South Central BOCES has received $1,991,184 that will serve 5,522 students in 11 of the BOCES’ 12 districts – plus Lamar School District, which is outside of the BOCES but joined in the grant – as part of Cohort 2, which means the organization has been in the planning stages.
“We’re part of the ‘go slow to go fast’ group in Cohort 2, so we’ve been working on making sure that every school district can make decisions locally about how they want to expend some of the funds,” LePlatt explained.
South Central’s model is the Homegrown Talent Initiative, a statewide effort to create career-connected learning experiences for students through grade 12 in rural communities across the state.
“This is really about engaging students and giving them real-life experiences in potential careers, in ways that connect them with community professionals in the industry and forging relationships that can be shared throughout the districts, and so forming a true pathway from school to career,” LePlatt said, adding that the BOCES is prioritizing developing an internship structure and then an internship model for the districts, along with industry certifications.
Next up will be retaining staff that can deepen the program, with grant funding going toward everything “from recruitment to retention to incentivizing positions,” she explained.
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AeroLab boosts afterschool and fifth day learning with ELO Grant
Posted 03/01/2023 - 9:05am
Students in the East Grand and West Grand school districts have a safe environment to continue learning outside of their regular four-day school week thanks to funding from Colorado’s Expanded Learning Opportunities Grant Program . Colorado AreoLab’s 5th Day Afterschool and summer programs are helping students who struggled during the pandemic improve their math scores and build social emotional skills with project-based STEM education.
Colorado earmarked $10 million of the American Rescue Plan’s third round of Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief funding, known as ESSER III, for the ELO grants. These funds are intended to accelerate learning and enhance well-being among students most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, including those from low-income families, racial and ethnic minorities and students with unstable housing situations.
Colorado AeroLab received $337,500 for its summer program and $423,000 for its afterschool programs that serve two Grand County rural and remote districts facing post-pandemic challenges. The educational non-profit was one of 60 organizations throughout Colorado that received Expanded Learning Opportunities grants. The awardees, announced in September 2022 , included school districts, charter schools, libraries, community-based providers and institutes of higher learning.
“CAL’s secret to success is to ‘disguise’ learning as fun, such as teaching the science of solar energy by making s’mores in an aluminum foil solar oven built by students, or learning about local ecology and ecosystems by seeing the landscape from the height of the ski gondola,” said Elaine Menardi, executive director of Colorado AeroLab. “A combination of indoor and outdoor activities challenge students to put their academic knowledge and individual experiences together to learn through doing.”
The organization’s grant application noted that in Grand County, where 78% of the economy depends on tourism, COVID recovery has been especially slow: “Even with an abundance of accommodations and service-industry jobs, parents are trying to survive on low wages amid the rising cost of housing, fuel, and food, often working two or more jobs to make ends meet. The social-emotional impact on young people has been huge, especially when parents are absent from home, affecting every aspect of life from job loss to food security to mental health to academic confidence and achievement.”
Parents, stretched thin by the chaos of the last few years, need a safe and healthy place for their kids to spend time during non-school hours. Some youth have struggled with fears around parental job loss, low self-esteem and a sense of hopelessness.
“Kids are trying to get back after several difficult years. We had some significant closures at the height of the pandemic. The population of Spanish-speaking students has grown,” Menardi said. “On top of that, we had the East Troublesome Fire. We have some kids whose houses still haven’t been rebuilt yet.”
One way the educational non-profit is addressing the effects of such instability on students is by teaching math skills. Most students say they hate math and this attitude has a direct impact on their grades and their overall engagement at school, according to Colorado AeroLab’s grant application.
“The goal of 5th Day Afterschool Programs is to improve students’ attitude toward math through individualized support that helps them grow their confidence and strengthen their skills. When students feel more confident and capable, they are more eager to be at school and to do well in their classes. The 5th Day Afterschool Programs will help improve regular student attendance and academic achievement.”
Colorado AeroLab was founded in 2017 and has shown that its approach has been successful in past years. Parents say that the time educators spend with students outside of school hours is improving their grades and self-confidence, which increases their interest in learning. Based on previous outcomes, the non-profit predicts that 90% of participants will improve their rate of school attendance and raise their grade point averages.
In addition to benefiting students, Colorado AeroLab’s programs provide an additional employment option and source of income for the teachers who participate. Keeping good teachers in these small rural mountain communities has been difficult because the cost of living is higher than other areas of the state. Grand County school districts have had an especially hard time keeping math teachers. Teaching in these out-of-school programs can increase teachers’ overall pay to help incentivize them to stay in rural district positions.
“Our principals in our schools call it tutoring. But it’s turned into a little more than that,” Menardi said. “It helps for relationship building. It’s more relational than in the classroom. More relaxed. Kids get a snack and get to see their teachers as real people rather than someone standing in front of them teaching a subject. It’s super important for kids who need a positive role model.”
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Boulder Valley seeks to put teacher mentor in every school building
Posted 02/14/2023 - 5:58pm
Boulder Valley School District, one of the grantees that received ESSER funding to help create an effective teacher mentor program, will have a two-day summer institute for beginning teachers and plans to put teacher mentors in every one of its 56 schools.
Boulder is one of 26 Colorado school districts participating in the $9.5 million Teacher Mentor Grant program , which is designed to help ensure that novice teachers receive critical mentorship and coaching support that went missing during the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Learning disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic impacted everyone in education but beginning teachers faced an even steeper hill to climb than their more experienced peers. Just as students have learning gaps due to the disruption, beginning teachers also have their own missing pieces.
Some preservice educators were unable to have adequate clinical residency experiences because of quarantine rules or impacts. New to the profession or “probationary teachers” may have been completing their student teaching experience in the spring of 2020 when it was cut short by the initial COVID closings. Then those same preservice teachers were hired for the first time in the 2020-21 school year and may not have had quality mentorship, instructional modeling, additional professional learning, or feedback and support on their instruction.
The Colorado Department of Education, recognizing this problem, created the Mentor Grant Program from its ESSER III funding that will provide grantee districts the money through the 2023-24 school year to develop their own mentor programs.
Boulder Valley School District is using the majority of its $248,918 grant funding to pay the salary for a teacher on special assignment who will build the program plan with much of the rest of the funding being put toward a two-day summer institute with stipends for second-year induction mentors, according to Katie Mills, the district’s director of professional development. Boulder Valley has 88 educators in its induction program this year, with about 70 expected for the next school year.
Mills and the five other members of her professional learning team are looking at an expansion of the district’s existing one-year induction program.
“When you look at the research, one year is never enough, because at that point we’re really just getting started,” Mills said. “We’re now shifting to a two-year program. We have 56 schools, so our plan is to have an induction teacher leader in every building, who will act like a mentor leader to train teachers in that building, and to welcome new teachers and new student teachers. Then the induction piece is that we’ll train them to be the second-year mentors.”
Mills hopes that even veteran teachers who move to a new building will take advantage of this point person who can help them navigate unfamiliar territory.
Boulder Valley is also working with the University of Colorado Boulder, which is helping the district ground their mentor program decisions through research and assessment tools.
“We want to know: How do we take what we learn the first year into the second year?” Mills said. “We’re looking to CU to help us hone those decisions so that we can improve our retention rate in a meaningful and sustainable way.”
Mills pointed out that the current struggle to find and retain teachers is actually a new one for Boulder Valley.
“We’ve usually had all of these options, but since the pandemic, things are more complex now,” Mills said. “We need as much support as we can get there, and so we really appreciate that this grant bought us two years to try to figure it out.”
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Welcome to the ESSER Report
Posted 01/26/2023 - 11:14am
Welcome to the Colorado Department of Education’s blog about the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, where we will bring you stories about the funding created to address the immediate health and operational challenges of educating students during the Coronavirus pandemic.
For this inaugural post, we ask you to cast your mind back to March 2020 and try to remember what it was like when the world shut down. A strange novel virus was spreading across the globe. Hospitals and morgues were filling up, people were being told to stay home and schools were shutting their doors. In late March, the U.S. Congress quickly passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, which included $30.75 billion nationally for an Education Stabilization Fund.
From that legislation came ESSER I, II and III.
ESSER I helped districts pay for activities to provide remote education, re-open schools as quickly as possible, improve air quality, make facility repairs, purchase technology, buy supplies for sanitation, provide mental health support, address learning loss, provide summer school and afterschool programs and other activities necessary to continue school operations and employment of staff.
Districts such as Jefferson County used ESSER I funding to pay for translation services to communicate updates about COVID safety policies in more than 130 different languages in the district. The Southern Ute tribe spent its ESSER I funds to buy mobile internet hotspots to increase or boost internet service so students at home could receive an online education. Pueblo 60 used the money to buy laptops for students to attend classes remotely. Ellicott School District bought buses to allow the district to transport students to school while adhering to distancing requirements.
ESSER I preceded two other ESSER funds for schools. Ultimately, Colorado received a total of $1.8 billion in federal pandemic recovery funds to support students, families and educators. Through this blog, we will provide stories behind each fund and give you detailed looks into how schools spent their money in later blog posts and will also provide informative graphics, charts and explanations about how ESSER funding was spent throughout Colorado.
Today, the threat of COVID-19 is not as dire as in the spring of 2020, but the impacts of the pandemic remain. Nevertheless, the speed at which the nation and the state came together to help schools address the immediate health and operational challenges to educate the nation’s children as the world was shutting down should never be forgotten.
As always, you can learn more about how Colorado used its ESSER funding on CDE’s website.
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Mesa County Valley 51 designs robust teacher mentor program using ESSER III funds
Posted 01/26/2023 - 11:11am
Mesa County Valley 51 School District, which comprises the Grand Junction area, is using ESSER funding to develop a robust teacher mentoring program that includes a curriculum-based professional learning framework to help out its new teachers.
The U.S. government provided states $2 trillion from the Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief funds to help school districts recover from the impacts of the pandemic.
Colorado earmarked a portion of the third round of ESSER funding, known as ESSER III, for a Mentor Program Grant to help ensure that novice teachers receive critical mentorship and coaching support so that they could better navigate the transition into the in-person classroom.
Mesa 51 was one of 26 Colorado school districts to be awarded money from the state’s $9.5 million Mentor Grant Program. Mesa, specifically, received $520,284 for the two-year grant, said Danny Medved, director of professional learning for Mesa Valley 51 and the lead designer, with three others, on the district’s new teacher induction team.
“Our program is really three overarching parts, with the first being a targeted focus on alternative licensure and pre-licensure, and the second is using curriculum-based professional learning,” Medved said. “But that’s especially true for new educators. We’ve got to equip them to manage a classroom, but that’s only part of the challenge when you’re talking about long-term student engagement and teacher advocacy and success.”
Mesa 51 has identified 120 novice or first-year teachers, 35 of whom are on the alternative licensure track, and put what they are calling “lead content mentors” in place to work with them at all levels of education, including special education. The content mentors create a digital bank of content that can be used throughout the district for years to come.
“That includes videos of themselves teaching and using high-leverage instructional practices, and then really like unpacking things like, ‘Here's what I've learned as a veteran teacher,’ sort of the tips and tricks of the things a new teacher does or doesn’t want to do,” Medved said. “Then we look at how do we use these videos to better plan and engage students?”
The third prong for Mesa 51 has been working with the New Teacher Center , a national nonprofit based in California that partners with school districts to support and amplify educator effectiveness.
“We’re having them evaluate our overall program, and especially our various mentorship roles,” Medved said. “They will consult with us this year and next, showing us the kinds of mentoring models that are out there, and mostly helping us improve and enhance what we have in place. The big piece with them is, we want to tap into their expertise on program evaluation and assessing impact.”
In addition to the three primary components of its program, Medved said that Mesa 51 is also developing a guiding coalition to support new teachers and their mentors -- a Teacher Mentorship and Induction Programming Advisory Committee that starts this year and runs through the next.
“We have our local university on that committee, as well as our professional learning and induction team, and then the New Teacher Center will actually help us facilitate that process as an outside partner,” Medved said. “Just to say, you know, where are we headed, what really works, what doesn't, what's redundant, and what and when do we need to add things to improve upon what we’ve started?”
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Poudre School District uses Mentor Grant to help novice teachers
Posted 01/10/2023 - 3:07pm
On a dark and chilly November evening at Poudre School District’s IT Center in Fort Collins, more than two dozen first-year teachers have joined their mentors and a group of mentoring coaches to learn more about topics such as how to manage a classroom, best practices for equitable grading, and knowing when and where to seek out support when the going gets tough.
Because these are beginning teachers hoping to succeed post-pandemic, the going is almost guaranteed to get tough. That’s why when Congress passed the nearly $2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act in March 2021 – from which the third round of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, known as ESSER III, originated.
Colorado earmarked a portion of the funding for a Mentor Program Grant to help ensure novice teachers could receive critical mentorship and coaching support to better navigate the transition into the in-person classroom.
“Long before the pandemic, we were looking at how to more effectively address the high rates of teachers leaving the profession,” says Kristin Kipp, educator development specialist with the Colorado Department of Education and the program manager of the Mentor Program Grant . “The pandemic certainly made things worse across the board, but it particularly affected student teachers who suddenly found themselves navigating their programs remotely, which is a completely different experience. All of a sudden, they get the rug pulled out from under them when COVID shut everything down. When things opened back up again, now you have new teachers trying to manage something completely different from their expectations. And so the next thing you know, a lot of these new teachers are already considering leaving the teaching profession because it’s so incredibly stressful, and they hadn’t been able to acquire the skills and tools to deal with it.”
This past January, CDE hired Kipp to oversee the Mentor Program Grant, but prior to that, she had been a teacher for years, and so she understands the profession’s challenges.
“Suddenly thrust into an unfamiliar classroom setting with few resources, some probationary teachers began to question their career paths,” Kipp explains. “These teachers in their first three years, their anxiety and stress levels are already extremely high because there’s a lot thrown at you very fast. But add in an interrupted experience like the pandemic, where teachers couldn’t get their field hours in or they were managing things remotely, and you’re going to lose a lot of really good people before they even get started.”
The Mentor Program Grant uses $9.5 million from ESSER III for Colorado districts over a two-year period (starting with the 2022-23 school year and continuing through 2023-24) to develop and implement a comprehensive program for teacher induction and retention. In addition to the 26 grant recipients, another 24 districts are benefiting from the program through professional development outreach and workshops.
“It’s appropriate to use the funds to support programs statewide, and so we are digging deep to try to figure out what actually makes a good process for this,” Kipp says. “It’s one thing to say this is what we’ll do with the fund, but it’s another to have real teachers in front of you and try to figure out how can we best do that.”
Mentor Program Grant funds can be used for things like supplies and materials needed to create and manage the plan, district FTE employees to develop and facilitate related programs, the cost of substitute teachers filling in for mentors and mentees, and technology such as video recording equipment for workshops.
For instance, Poudre School District split its $903,247 in funding in half to cover both school years, putting the majority of each portion toward hiring four mentoring and retention coaches.
“There’s a reason we decided specifically to call them that,” explains Susan Steinmark, a teacher for more than 30 years who has taken over the role of coordinator for mentoring and educator effectiveness for Poudre’s Mentor Program. “We know that there’s a correlation between a strong mentoring program and retaining both new teachers and keeping veteran teachers engaged. The experienced teachers who participate in these programs definitely show a renewed interest and passion for the profession, and they pass that passion on to their mentees. It’s a win-win for everyone, really.”
The district had already begun implementing a mentoring program several years ago, but Steinmark notes that it was “focused more on problem-solving rather than being people-driven, and so our main mission has been to strengthen our existing program to emphasize reciprocal growth for both new educators and the veteran teachers who serve as mentors.”
For the 2022-23 school year, 110 beginning teachers have been paired with mentors, and Steinmark says the second year of the grant will see 86 new educators receiving mentoring.
Lora Bundy, a Poudre middle school teacher who participated in November’s workshop – the second of the quarterly sessions the district will offer each year – to spend quality time with her team of beginning fifth-grade teachers, says she feels reinvigorated by answering their questions and seeing them connect with others who are embracing the “labor of love” that is teaching. “Events like this workshop really help the first-year teachers understand that there are others in this with them, and that they are supported,” Bundy says.
In addition to mentoring beginning teachers, Mentor Grant Program funding can be used to support alternative licensure candidates, which allows school districts to hire teaching candidates who already hold an undergraduate or advanced degree and have expertise and knowledge in specific subjects. These candidates can teach while they complete the training to meet Colorado Teacher Quality Standards for becoming licensed teachers in the state.
“The ability to address alternative licensure candidates really deepens the available mentoring programs,” Kipp says. “These are people who maybe never considered becoming teachers, but who are feeling the call to put their considerable experience and education toward the classroom. Being able to match them with mentors who can help them navigate what it’s like to be in a room full of students is a real game-changer.”
Visit the CDE website to learn more about how Colorado schools have used their ESSER funding.
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Interactive graphic on common uses of ESSER funds
Posted 12/15/2022 - 1:40pm
CDE has created an interactive graphic that allows the user to see the common uses of ESSER funds, including ESSER I-3. CDE will be adding different features on its webpage to help provide an easier understanding of how ESSER money has been used in Colorado.
Find the interactive graphic on the main ESSER webpage.
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Manzanola uses ESSER funds for shelter
Posted 12/15/2022 - 9:44am
Spacing students far enough apart safely was a big concern in Manzanola School District 3J , a rural district on Colorado’s southeastern plains where temperatures can stay in the upper 90s and even above 100 well into October. The state had imposed distancing requirements to limit the spread of the virus, which proved difficult for schools that remained in session.
Manzanola Superintendent Nancy Westfall and her staff decided that students at her school needed to more opportunities to be outside during the school day, which would provide relief from the older buildings with poor circulation and air filtration and still maintain distancing. They seized on the idea to build a sturdy, 16-by-30-foot permanent shelter next to the playground with tables that could be easily cleaned.
Manzanola was awarded a total of $63,304 from ESSER I and used $33,556 to build the structure with the remainder going toward expenses around remote learning, including stipends for teachers to help defray costs for technology and supplies.
The shelter would also benefit the community by providing a shady spot where people could also distance themselves during public events such as field day.
“We didn’t have any shade on the playground, which is for the whole K through 12,” Westfall explained. “So, the high temps limited the amount of time anyone could tolerate being outside. This shelter was a game-changer, and it’s something we’re able to use forever for both students and the community.”
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Ellicott School District buys school buses to maintain distancing
Posted 12/13/2022 - 11:44am by Jeremy Meyer, Director of Communications
Chris Smith, superintendent for Ellicott School District 22, which sits east of Colorado Springs in the middle of a vast swath of farms dotting windswept prairie, said that he and his staff felt “an enormous sense of fear” as everything ground to a halt in the spring of 2020. The coronavirus was spreading across the globe, schools were going remote and restrictions on everything from gathering to how close people could stand were being imposed.
From the start, he said, “our main concerns were sifting through a mountain of information and learning new ways to do things, or reading through and trying to figure out health department attempts to give everyone plans to operate. Never in a million years did I ever think I would need to understand what PCR or antigen testing meant.”
Because Ellicott serves a 220-square-mile area with 80% of its 1,000 students needing to be bused in, Smith said he and his staff soon realized that keeping students safely distanced would be paramount, and so they looked at solutions such as staggering start and end times, switching to a block schedule where students would come in every other day, or dividing the district into quadrants to get everyone to the 80-acre campus that houses pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in multiple buildings.
Ultimately, they decided that adding three more buses to their existing 15 made the most sense because it would allow them to put fewer students on each bus, and so Ellicott put its $143,987 in ESSER I funding toward the total cost of $305,300 for the new vehicles. Learn more about how Ellicott used their ESSER funding on the Colorado School Finance Project's website.
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