As the COVID-19 pandemic becomes a distant memory to public schools, access to the one-time federal funding stemming from it will soon follow.

After four years of historic funding into public education, the Elementary & Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) are set to expire this fall.

Districts throughout Colorado Springs have kept what has been referred to as “the ESSER cliff” in mind almost as much as the funds themselves to avoid any financial fallout in the years ahead.

“We knew it was one-time funding,” Harrison District 2 Superintendent Wendy Birhanzel said.

In total, Colorado has received $1.8 billion from ESSER to support students, families and educators following the pandemic in three separate installments. The first two, commonly referred to as ESSER I and ESSER II, were distributed in March and December 2020 and focused on reopening schools with safety precautions enacted to continue instruction.

ESSER III, which totaled over $1 billion of the state’s funds, is intended for learning loss recovery and is set to expire Sept. 30 this year.

Learning loss refers specifically to the school instruction time that was lost due to the pandemic. ESSER III requires all local districts to spend at least 20% of funds they receive toward learning loss recovery.

Within these broad parameters, ESSER funds have been used for everything from adding staff and mental health professionals at schools to increasing wages along with replacing air conditioning units and creating new summer and afterschool programs and online academies.

Across the Pikes Peak region, urban and rural districts identified both immediate and ongoing needs that could now be addressed through the one-time federal funding.

“This allowed us to meet student needs,” Birhanzel said. “And if it weren’t for this funding, we would not be able to do what we needed to do with students. It would have drained our budget.”

But the seismic investment into public education has also created concerns of an equally seismic downturn once the funding is gone. Across the country, districts are grappling with eliminating positions that were created and sustained through ESSER while many of the summer programs developed in recent years are likely to get consolidated, if not cut completely.

Along with reopening schools and developing programs, the funding shakeup has retooled how districts use their funding going forward.

“What I thought was brilliant about this was that they recognized it’s not just an immediate crisis and they accounted for the ongoing learning losses,” Birhanzel said.

New additions through one-time funds

According to the Colorado Department of Education, 45.71% of its ESSER III funds have been distributed as of March 30, 2024.

Fund allocation was determined by district population and their specific needs identified based off the existing Title 1 formula and previous fiscal years.

Throughout El Paso County, districts addressed learning losses by establishing summer and afterschool programs for students and adding staff, resources and training opportunities.

Colorado Springs School District 11, which received the most ESSER III funding in El Paso County at $59.9 million, opted to utilize funds predominantly to expand its summer bridge learning recovery program, with additional interventionists and paraprofessionals.

D-11 Chief Resource Officer Brandan Comfort said the district adjusted its approach to ESSER spending, moving to a more proactive plan that addressed student and staff needs unique to them.

“We spent these funds in a way that was exactly what it was intended to do,” he said.

Specific examples include the introduction of dyslexia curriculum throughout the district and bathroom renovations at all of its middle schools to address some privacy and safety concerns.

Comfort said the bathroom investments specifically came after they “heard loud and clear” from numerous parents, students and faculty.

“To hear students say, ‘I don’t go to the bathroom while I’m at school because it’s not safe for me,’ that’s a problem,” he said.

Harrison D-2, which received the second-most funding at $38 million, invested in a new online school in 2021, licensed social workers for every school in the district, new technology and updated curriculum for the district going forward.

Birhanzel noted that they would have also likely invested in infrastructure if they hadn’t just passed a bond vote in 2018 ahead of the ESSER funding.

Elsewhere, rural districts that received significantly less federal funding opted to similarly use it toward instructional interventionists, afterschool tutoring and stipends for existing staff and salaries for paraprofessionals as needed.

Nationwide, efforts and initiatives on local levels appear to be yielding their own success. Chalkbeat reported that two independent studies found the various initiatives enacted by school districts have improved test scores in reading and math overall.

Preliminary test results released last month by the Colorado Department of Education, however, showed mixed results in closing the gaps created by COVID-19, with some grades meeting or exceeding goals in various subjects and others remaining behind. The CMAS test results for grades 3-8 reported students continuing to demonstrate increased math and English language arts (ELA) achievement, with grades 3-6 at or above 2019 scores. That said, 4th and 8th graders remain behind in ELA scores.

Also, SAT/PSAT scores in math reportedly decreased from last year, though the transition to all-digital testing is suspected to have played a role in this dip.

Birhanzel said D-2’s ESSER investments have been successful in the efforts to recover learning loss in some areas, but not all. She pointed to student scores in ELA recovering “immediately” and math scores recovering this past year. She added that the kindergarten and 1st grade have continued to struggle in some subjects while acknowledging that reading and writing is “inherently difficult” to learn online.

Comfort echoed optimism in his district’s learning recovery, citing its spring test results that have yet to have been released to the public.

Going forward

With all the success districts have experienced through ESSER-financed initiatives, the looming question has been what will happen after the funding is gone.

Across the nation, concerns have arisen over cutting positions completely tied to ESSER funding or cutting other programs in order to keep staff, sustain wage increases and other resources.

In D-11, Comfort admitted that the district will likely consolidate its Summer Bridge program to a handful of options once ESSER is gone and that the funding helped them fill most of the 140 vacancies through the funding.

He added that the administrative cuts recently approved in their budget for the upcoming school year were agreed upon in large part to maintain staff and benefits going forward.

“We built our budget this year in a pretty creative way to protect our staff,” he said. “And we feel like we’ve effectively navigated that ESSER cliff.”

Similarly, D-2 spent the majority of its funds in a way that emphasized one-time needs like new curriculum, teacher training and technology investments. Birhanzel said that other ongoing expenses started from ESSER will be redirected to the district’s general fund, Title 1 funding and other grant programming.

D-2 is also preparing a ballot measure for the November elections that would increase local taxes to go towards teacher salaries and benefits along with its scholarship program D-2 Promise.

Birhanzel said she has heard from staff and administrators from other local districts that positions will have to be cut along with other downsizing measures to absorb funding losses, but that the 46 positions in D-2 that are currently ESSER funded will be continuing next year.

“We benefited immensely from the ESSER funds and feel like we’re in a good place going forward.”