ESSER 3.0 Funds

Hello. The purpose of this presentation is to share information about the district's plan's planned use for allocated federal funds coming to us in the form of a program called ESSER 3.0. Our task is to share that information with you and more importantly, to gather your input and feedback through a survey after you view this presentation.

Williamson County Schools will soon be applying to the state with a plan to use the allocated federal funds from the American Rescue Plan Act or ARPA. This same fund is also named ESSER 3.0. We use that term ESSER for any elementary and secondary school relief funds and this is the third such act that has sent funds for elementary and secondary school relief since the global pandemic began in March of 2020. So again, our task is that we need your input and feedback because part of the requirements of applying for these funds is to ensure that we have reached out to our family and stakeholders here in Williamson County Schools. We will submit our application before August 1, as soon as we can get it ready. Thank you for your time attention and input on the front end.

To give you a broad overview of the state of Tennessee, you can see as I said earlier, we have had three buckets of federal funds to be allocated to the state and then the state then allocates a portion of those to the districts, so we had ESSER 1.0, which was also called The Cares Act, ESSER 2.0, and now ESSER 3.0, which is The American Rescue Plan Act. You will see the state funding amount in that second row where the ESSER 1.0 - the whole state of Tennessee got 260 million dollars. 2.0 received 1.1 billion and then with ESSER 3.0, the current funding that we are working on right now is 2.48 billion dollars. Now you will notice in the next row that the state did not have spending requirements that were very stringent on the first two acts. It could be on anything needed in response to the pandemic but ESSER 3.0 designated things that the state itself needed to spend that money on in order to address learning loss among our students. So, you will see the funding amount to the districts is 90 percent of the state funding and that it has grown as well for each of these acts with ESSER 3.0 being more than double of what they had in ESSER 2.0.

This slide shows the fund availability and planning timelines for the three different ESSER funds. You can see the start point for this graph is March of 2020 when the global pandemic caused our schools to shut down for a little while. We have in orange the fund availability period and you can see the staggered starts of ESSER 1, 2, and 3. You'll notice that the funds in ESSER 2 and 3 are allowed to be spent in reimbursement for costs that came earlier so we can choose to use the funds to reimburse the districts for expenses that they had due to the global pandemic starting in March of 2020. You will see that the start point availability point for the ESSER 3 fund is right here at the end of the school year 2020 – 2021. That is because in May and June is when it really became available to start working on our plans. The plans are due by August 1^st and the ESSER 3 funds that we are here to talk about today could be used for the next few school years all the way through to September of 2024.

Now the allocation for Williamson County is listed on this slide. In ESSER 1.0 you see our allocation was over 599 million, I am sorry 599,000. Then ESSER 2.0 was 2.3 million and ESSER 3.0 is just about double that with 5.2 million. Please keep in mind that the amounts that we are allocated at the district for these federal funds are based on our share of Title One funding in the state and that Title One funding is based on the poverty rate in our geographic county as well as student enrollment in our district. So, in ESSER 1.0 with that much smaller amount of funding we used that to the main use of that was to pay the salaries for our cafeteria staff to keep our students fed during the time of the spring of 2020 when they were not physically in schools. In ESSER 2.0 we used that funding for a lot of technology needs that were necessary for remote and distance learning, for a COVID director to help guide us through this emergency time period, and staff for vaccine distribution. We have spent almost all of the ESSER 2.0 funds at this point in time and they've all been allocated. We know what we are spending them on, and they will be all spent soon. ESSER 3.0 is what we are now considering what to spend this money on that. That is now in the application that's due August 1st and that could be used for things anytime from March of 2020 all the way to September of 2024. You will notice with the 5.2 million that we are allocated that is significantly less than our neighboring districts. You may hear projects and things going on in other districts in the state or other districts in the country that are much more ambitious than what we will be able to do simply because our funding with us or 3.0 is much less than some of those others and again that is because of it being based on that poverty rate so the allowable uses for ESSER 3.0 fall into four big possible spending buckets. You are not required to spend them on all four spending buckets. You can choose to spend them on any one or more of the four but the four are academic, which would mean spending it on things like tutoring or reading and math needs. It is student readiness for learning, which would be maybe spending it on academic advising mental health issues, the needs of our special populations for instance students experiencing homelessness, or students with disabilities, English language learners. Then the third bucket is educator workforce that is spelled out as you can use ESSER 3.0 funds. If you need to spend it to retain or recruit educators or leaders or additional staff that are needed particularly because of the global pandemic and learning loss and that sort of thing. And finally the fourth bucket is foundations. Foundations for infrastructure such as technology, hardware, and software access to high-speed internet perhaps, some facility improvements for the health and safety reasons, and then also just anything we might need to spend it on in order to monitor our use of these funds. Audit collect data and report to the state. We could allocate funds to help us do that as well. The one big requirement in our application is that we have to ensure that at least 20 percent of the total funds must target learning loss and I’ll define that on the next slide. It's allowable to spend 100 percent on learning loss but we must spend at least 20 percent. The thing to keep in mind with any funding like this is that we are always mindful of when we get funding like this - these are one-time funds so if we have needs that are long-term needs and core needs, we plan to address those with our other regular local funding. But these are one-time funds that are meant for a particular purpose at a particular time so we are going to be mindful of things that are in response to the pandemic that we can use these on.

The requirements that we have in order to get the funds are to do a very thorough needs assessment which we're in the process of doing: to write up a health and safety plan according to the state's template on how we will reopen our schools safely. Now we've been open most of the last year - almost all of the last year so we feel confident we're ready to do that and we'll be reopening in in the fall in a very safe way, but we have to fill out that health and safety plan for the state in this application. We also must show that we've received input from various stakeholders so that's where you come in and we hope that you will complete the survey at the end of this presentation. We know that the other requirements will be after we are allocated the funding and once the state approves our application and allocates the funding for the purposes described, we will have some heavy requirements for collecting data to ensure that the spending on those things had a positive effect and was effective to the goals that we set. We will have to do some monthly reporting to the state on both the programs and the fiscal requirements on the money that we are spending and how it is being spent by month. The state will be monitoring us both on the fiscal side for the spending and the program side for the effectiveness of the programs we use the 5.2 million for, and then of course will be audited on these funds when we do have our plan approved. There is a very specific template called the public plan that we will fill out and once our plan is approved, that template which includes student demographics, the funding amounts, the conclusions of our needs assessment, our plans for the spending -that public plan will be posted on our website once our plan is approved.

I’d like to speak to what we've found so far for evidence of learning loss. The learning loss that we have seen has been evidenced as follows: We noticed because of the remote learning we had to do in the spring of 2020 that there was content missed during that closure so we immediately in this the spring and summer of 2020 revised our scope and sequence documents for every content area and grade level to add in that missing content where it most naturally fit, in either the scope and sequence curriculum documents for this past year 2020 - 2021 or we knew some of it fit better in the 21 - 22 school year so by the end of next year, we will have caught up on those missing pieces of content so we don't see a remaining need on solving that problem. We do a universal screener for reading and math as part of our RTI process in Williamson County Schools and across the whole state and that is a requirement that we do. We found there were more students needing intervention this year in reading and math meaning they had skills deficits in reading and math, especially in our lower elementary grades but it was true K to Eight. We did address that with our local budget that has been proposed to and approved by our board and is now in front of our county commission. We address this by adding another eight interventionist positions in the budget. Those interventionists work directly with students in a focused way on those skill deficits and small groups. They monitor their progress and if it is not working, we change the intervention in order to try to bring those kids up to grade level in reading and or math. Our spring of 2021 data indicates it would take another 16 to meet the need for intervention being provided by people in an interventionist position at our current numbers and needs we would have to have our instructional coaches, who have a different role in our in our schools providing that intervention, which takes them away from being able to coach teachers. So, we can get it done no matter what but if we could add some more interventionists, it would take the load off those coaches. We do see this as a temporary need due to the learning loss from the pandemic and we believe that if we could address this with more interventionists over the next couple years, we would come back to needing fewer interventionists later. We know another evidence of learning loss came in our number of referrals for mental health needs, which has increased over the past year. We already added a social worker position to our local budget. We also budgeted twenty-six thousand dollars in another federal fund for mental health supports. We have a continuing partnership with Mercy Healthcare and STARS provides therapists in our district, but we do have a remaining need and believe that adding some clinical social workers maybe by region of the county to address some of those needs would take that load off of our current workforce and also better provide the efficient services to our students. This is all about the mental health needs of students. We might also use some of the funds for additional STARS therapists. The fourth area that we see as evidence of learning loss is the EDTech in our Educational Technology Help Desk requests. We see an increased need to support teachers in helping their student integrate technology for student use. You know technology integration is not going away, it's something we were working on before the pandemic and we had to jump in full force due to the pandemic, but we look forward to a blended learning environment for a long time in many ways.

So, in response to that, we have restructured a little bit and designated some teachers at the schools to serve as digital learning leaders to help provide some training at the school level and support for their colleagues, but we would love to be able to use perhaps some of this funding to pay for them to work beyond their own full-time teaching load. The highest needs identified by Williamson County Schools leadership at this point in time are the additional interventionists to work with students during the school day to find some way to add to our mental health professionals to address the mental health needs of students and to provide stipends for those digital learning leaders. We are not sure if all of these will make it into our plan, if it'll be some of these, if there will be an additional need that comes up in the next month, but this is where the thoughts are at the current time here in June of 2021.

We need your input on those highest needs. We need to know if you in your role, whatever that is for our school district, whether you're a parent a community, educational provider, and a non-profit, whatever your role is, have you seen evidence of student learning loss due to the pandemic? The survey will ask you that as a yes or no question and then if your answer is yes, there is a question about where you check off which of the following is your greatest concern and that is to get us to see if your lens is showing us what we're seeing. We also then have a question where we list some of our priorities that we have identified to find out which is your highest priority for the ESSER 3.0 funding. Remember for these five million dollars there is a spot you can check off the ones we have or one of the ones that we have and there is also an option for you to type in an additional need that we have not identified. So, you can either choose one of the ones we have identified as your highest priority, or you can add an additional one that you would like us to consider. So, we hope you will answer with your survey today. I do want to say I think I mentioned that I was going to define learning loss and I realized I never did so I want to go back and say that learning loss is defined by the state as either a decrease in a student's skills or knowledge or a pause in advancement in their skills and knowledge due to lack of instruction from either being out of school or not being in person. So that is what learning loss is defined as. I hope this helped you understand a little more about ESSER 3.0 funding and I hope you will answer our survey when you have a chance. Thank you.