When Angela Dominguez took the helm of Donna Independent School District in Texas in 2021, she thought the district’s original decision to use most of its federal Elementary and Secondary School Relief (ESSER) money to pay for existing fourth- and fifth-grade teacher positions was short-sighted.
“I was like, ‘Did you guys think that we were going to just do without fourth and fifth grade after ESSER?’” she recalled.
Dominguez had a longer term vision for the remaining rounds of pandemic emergency funding: Hire teaching assistants for early elementary classrooms to help the district’s youngest learners, who were struggling with math and reading as a result of uneven exposure to school during remote learning.
“My belief about these types of funds is [they] come around one time, and the investment needed to be in things that were tangible, that would be lasting for our students, our staff and our community,” said Dominguez, who created a committee to ensure ESSER investments aligned with these goals.
Congress rolled out nearly $190 billion in ESSER funds in three phases to states between 2020 and 2022 to help school districts address academic and social-emotional hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic on students.
Districts generally had flexibility in how they used the money to support pandemic-related recovery on all fronts, from getting students back to in-person learning to supporting student academic and social-emotional recovery.
Districts used ESSER funds in myriad ways and with varying outcomes. EdSurge talked to three districts — in Donna, Texas, Fulton County, Georgia and Guilford Country, North Carolina — that are seeing gains despite the emergency funds’ expiration. They made educated, data-driven bets on how to best support their students and teachers by investing in educational infrastructure and support systems, from high-dosage tutoring to teacher coaching and professional development on new, streamlined literacy and math curricula.
Their data show their bets are paying off. What’s more, these districts have found ways to sustain these improvements despite ESSER’s ending.
Sasha Pudelski, who directs advocacy efforts for AASA, the school superintendents association, which did a comprehensive survey of district leaders about their pandemic emergency fund spending, said the approach these three districts took resonates with the survey findings and fulfilled what she called the government’s “holistic vision” of funding long-term student needs.
Superintendents saw ESSER “not just as an opportunity to meet the urgent and immediate needs of their students, but also as a chance to invest in systemic, long-term improvements that would make a lasting impact on students and educators,” she said.
Not all districts have been able to maintain their pandemic emergency-funded initiatives and programs.
“There are high-poverty communities that have lower property tax bases and lower commercial property revenues and declining populations and higher student community needs,” Pudelski said, that prevent them from reallocating resources now that ESSER is over. Those districts “disproportionately felt the impact of the expiration of the funds.”
In-Class Assistants
Under Dominguez’ leadership, Donna, Texas, refocused its ESSER spending to support its youngest learners. Pre-pandemic assessment scores showed that more than 90 percent of third graders were not reading at grade level and 95 percent were below grade level in math. So the district used relief funds to recruit, hire and train classroom assistants for concentrated reading and math instruction in pre-kindergarten through grade 2.
That decision paid off: In two years, from 2021 to 2023, tests showed third graders reading at grade level jumped from 9 percent to 31 percent, and those achieving math proficiency went from just 5 percent to 27 percent. Dominguez called the results “remarkable.”
These gains prompted the district to prioritize the program in its annual budget. Dominguez said Donna is using a combination of state and other federal funds to retain the assistants.
“That investment really did get us a lot of traction around students getting to some [level of] recovery,” she added.
Focus on Literacy
Playing the long game also drove Fulton County, Georgia, schools’ ESSER spending strategy. But it was tempting to direct all the emergency funds toward immediate needs, according to Fulton’s chief academic officer Brannon Gaskins.
“There were two schools of thought around using the ESSER funds,” Gaskins recalled. “How do we reopen schools as soon as possible? And what is the long-term plan for those funds?”
Dedicating most of its ESSER funds to supporting students’ literacy development made the most sense to the district’s leaders, Gaskins said. Recognizing the high probability of student learning declines as a result of remote learning, Fulton used the money to accelerate pre-pandemic plans to reorganize literacy instruction around scientific reading principles.
“We knew there was a way to use these funds in an innovative way that would really impact us five, 10 years after the pandemic,” Gaskins said.
As part of a three-year plan to help students recover from pandemic-related learning setbacks, Fulton created Every Child Reads. The initiative included training district leaders, principals, early elementary teachers and staff on the science of reading, installing a dedicated literacy coach in every elementary school, setting up high-dosage tutoring and replacing dozens of disparate reading programs across the district with high-quality instructional materials.
Similar to Donna, Texas, Fulton dedicated a district finance director to oversee ESSER spending, which Gaskins said helped the district spend its funds efficiently.
Later, the district evaluated Every Child Reads and found that Fulton outpaced state averages in literacy achievement — a feat state assessments confirmed. The findings persuaded Fulton to eliminate or scale back programs that weren’t working or no longer needed, such as small-group tutors and high-dosage tutoring, and supplement or expand programs that showed results, such as a dedicated literacy coach in every school.
“Although our budgets are tight, our superintendent said we will deprioritize other things in our budget to make sure we have the literacy coaches that we need,” Gaskins said.
He added that enhancing teachers’ literacy instruction “will have generational effects.”
“When you think about a brand-new teacher or a novice teacher five years in…and they still have 25 more cohorts of students to teach [over their career], that has a huge impact on generations of students,” Gaskins said.
High-Dosage Tutoring
Even before the pandemic, education leaders in Guilford County, North Carolina, were concerned about middle grade math proficiency. That concern, coupled with an outpouring of community support for and research on the power of high-dosage tutoring, drove the district’s ESSER concentration, said chief academic officer Jusmar Maness.
The difference in Guilford’s program compared to other districts’ high-dosage tutoring, she added, is that it was “home grown.” The district established a department to oversee the program and recruited and trained tutors from the local universities it already partnered with for other programs.
“We knew the investment needed to be at the student level,” Maness said. “But we also needed to build capacity within our district to be able to continue this work.”
At its peak, Guilford’s tutoring program supported more than 17,000 students from kindergarten through eighth grade. The district also introduced coaching and professional development aligned to new, high-quality math instructional materials to enhance teachers’ math instruction.
“Expanded teacher capacity has been critical,” Maness said. “These efforts were designed to ensure that every single one of our teachers had the support and tools they needed to engage students in that grade-level content and accelerate learning.”
By scaling the program quickly and broadly and building teachers’ instructional capacity in math, Guilford helped its fourth-grade students hold steady in math achievement by the 2023 school year. These students also recovered much faster than their peers in large U.S. cities.
Maness said the addition of tutors during the school day also deepened students’ feelings of connectedness in school.
“They don’t only have the teacher, but they also have a tutor [who] is another trusted adult that they have a relationship with,” she said.
Maness added that the tutoring program and teacher development were unequivocally the right investments for their pandemic emergency funds, which the district exhausted.
“I don’t know that there’s something we would have changed,” she said. “We were able to really reach so many students and provide them what they needed.”
Focusing its ESSER funds on a program fueled by community support has meant that, with some modifications, Guilford has been able to sustain its tutoring program through local philanthropy after ESSER dried up. The district now provides high-dosage tutoring in literacy for kindergarten to grade 3 and math for grades 6 to 8, and supports high school students through out-of-school learning hubs.
“We had support from universities. We have support from the community. It’s thanks to those relationship and philanthropic partners we’ve been able to continue the work beyond ESSER,” Maness said, adding that the district continues to advocate for state and federal funding.
Uncertain Future
But districts across the country are also bracing for other federal cuts after President Donald Trump’s executive order to dismantle the Department of Education.
“We would just not even be able to function if we lost federal funding,” Dominguez in Donna, Texas, said. “We would have to lay off staff across the board.”
She added that state-level priorities in Texas have shifted, making budgets tighter. Her district is rounding out this school year $8 million short.
“The state is not any better right now than the federal [funding]. School vouchers just passed, and money for public ed has been kind of held hostage,” Dominguez said. “We’re fortunate to have a very healthy fund balance, but we can’t keep dipping into savings forever and expect it to stay that way.”
Maness in Guilford hopes policymakers keep in mind the need for continued investment in public schools.
“We want the people that are making the decisions on funding to understand how critical investments like these are for our students,” she said.