Education Week - March 15, 2023 - 4

Why a Handful of School
Districts Rejected COVID
Relief Funds
By Mark Lieberman
An overwhelming majority of
school district leaders this year are
eyeing the finish line for federal
COVID relief dollars and pondering
a future without them.
Stewart Jesse, superintendent of
Glass City Academy, a public charter
district in Toledo, Ohio, is not among
them.
He and his colleagues chose not to
accept the $75,000 in federal relief
funds they were offered across three
rounds during the pandemic. That
places Glass City among a small number
of districts across the country that
rejected the federal relief funds made
available to them since the early days
of the pandemic.
" Everybody I talk to about this, they
look at me like I am the most crazy superintendent
in the world, " Jesse said.
But he's in charge of an atypical district
with a $2.5 million budget that
has rejected all federal funds available
to it since it opened in 2003. Glass
City's reasons for rejecting federal relief
funds, as with other districts that
did the same, stem from its unique
circumstances.
Glass City's 400 students are all enrolled
in dropout recovery-a series of
narrowly targeted academic programs
that help students who abandoned
their traditional schooling track get on
a path to graduation and then postsecondary
education or the workforce.
Because of that narrow focus, small
student body, and wealth of generous
donations from community partners,
the district was able to weather the
early days of the pandemic without
much fiscal strife.
Glass City Academy reopened its
doors for full-time, in-person learning
in August 2020, so it didn't see
learning loss on the scale of students
in other districts that had their physical
campuses closed longer. Plus,
the district was already adept at
teaching remotely because that was
the only way some students could
attend school.
Local nonprofit partners regularly
take up shop in the schools' community
service hub, charging the district
nothing and providing all kinds of resources
for students-assistance with
housing, health, family issues, mental
health counseling, career advising,
summer tutoring, and more.
That's all made it possible for Jesse
to say no to an offer he thought would
be, more than anything, an administrative
headache.
" We're very unique. I don't think
99 percent of the school districts "
could have weathered the pandemic
as well without federal aid, Jesse said.
Districts that rejected ESSER
funds are a rarity
Indeed, most haven't tried. Education
Week asked state education
departments to share lists of districts
that didn't accept federal relief funds
allocated to them.
More than 20 states had no districts
reject pandemic aid from the
federal government. In Texas, one
district didn't accept the first round
of federal aid because it closed and
consolidated with another district.
But Education Week's nationwide
search did turn up that a tiny fraction
of districts-roughly 15 traditional public
school districts and 45 charter districts-chose
not to receive federal relief
funds. Some of the charters didn't
accept funds because they were in the
process of closing as part of the regular
churn of those types of schools.
Schools collectively received
$190 billion from the federal government
during the pandemic to spend
on COVID mitigation tools, digital
devices, and anything that would
help students and staff recover from
the disruption wrought by the pandemic.
The federal government directed
aid through the existing Title
I formula, which meant most, but not
all, districts were offered some funds.
Some districts rejected federal relief
funds on principle.
The Paris school district in Wisconsin
turned down $320,000, or
$1,100 per student. The district's
superintendent told the state education
department in emails obtained
by the news station WUWM that he
was concerned about a link between
receiving COVID funds and having to
follow public health guidelines.
The state education department, in
a statement to WUWM, disputed that
a decision not to follow public health
guidelines would affect how much the
district would receive.
Others had more practical reasons
to turn down the money.
In New Hampshire, three districts reA
District's Long-Term Investment
In Cultivating Future Teachers Is Paying Off
Ector County, Texas, saw its teacher vacancy rate drop in less than four years
By Caitlynn Peetz
ers, and boosting teachers' pay.
" In public education for many years,
While schools across the country
struggle to fill vacant teaching positions,
one Texas district is capitalizing
on groundwork it laid in 2019 that has
led to a near-zero vacancy rate.
When Ector County Superintendent
Scott Muri took over the
33,500-student district in the summer
of 2019, there were 356 teaching
vacancies-the equivalent of 18
percent of the district's teaching positions-just
weeks before classes were
set to begin.
Less than four years later, the district
had a vacancy rate of 1 percent
across its 44 campuses at the start
of this academic year. That's not an
accident.
When Muri took over as superintendent,
he and his administration
committed-financially and ideologically-to
overhauling the district's
staffing strategy, recognizing that the
business-as-usual approach of posting
openings and hoping for the best
wasn't working. Since then, the strategy
has centered on cultivating the
district's own pipeline of future teachwe've
been looking for the silver bullet,
and in my opinion as a superintendent,
the silver bullet is the teacher, "
Muri said. " So, investing deeply in
growing, developing, attracting, recruiting,
and retaining our teachers is
the right investment to make. "
Ector County's progress is impressive
as other districts struggle to fill
teaching positions. Though there
are no authoritative, national data
on teacher vacancies, one report
estimated the country had around
36,500 teacher vacancies at the start
of the 2022-23 school year. Regardless
of the number, it's clear that
prolonged periods without an experienced
teacher in any subject can
have a negative effect on students'
learning, and that students who need
the most support are affected most.
Students with disabilities and English
learners often have less access
to specialized services when there
are not enough teachers or support
personnel.
Those impacts would be felt deeply
in Ector County, where nearly half of
4 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 15, 2023 | www.edweek.org
the students live in poverty.
So Ector County leaders took action,
investing in a multi-point plan to
combat its staffing problems.
First, the district restructured its
salary schedules, raising starting
teachers' minimum salary to about
$58,000 this year, compared with
$52,000 in 2019. On the upper end,
with the right combination of education
and experience, teachers are
now able to earn a larger annual salary
than an assistant principal-more
than $100,000.
Muri said the opportunity for teachers
to make more money than an administrator
is a huge draw and has
even encouraged some administrators
to go back to the classroom.
" For years in this business, people
have become administrators ... in part
because they needed to make more
money, but in this district that's not
the case, " Muri said. " We actually
have administrators who say, 'I need
to make more money, so I need to become
a teacher.' "
The district also offers " incentive
pay " each year. It rewards the teachers
it considers most effective-the
top 15 percent, based on their students'
improvement on the Measures
of Academic Progress assessments
and internal teacher performance
evaluations-with bonuses.
Investments and partnerships
pay dividends
Simultaneously, the district began
building up several career pathways,
both for students and exisiting employees.
About
100 high school students are
enrolled in an education-focused career
and technical education program
that allows them to earn both their high
school diploma and an associate degree
at the same time. Essentially, when
those students graduate from high
school, they only need two more years
of college before they graduate and are
able to pursue their teaching careers.
Ector County also has built a " paraprofessional
to teacher " pathway in
which paraprofessionals in the district
can pursue teaching certifications
with the district's help. Muri said the
district pays the full college tuition for
paraprofessionals who pursue teaching
degrees. Ector County partnered
with local colleges to create an expedited
three-year program those staff
members can pursue, while still working
for the district.
As part of another partnership,
Ector County developed a paid
teacher residency program, in which
college seniors are paid $45,000 per
year and earn course credit for spending
a year working on site alongside a
more experienced teacher.
The idea, Muri said, is that those
students will return to the district to
teach when they graduate, and they'll
do so with the equivalent of one to two
years of experience. So, rather than
entering with a first-year teacher's
mastery, they'll come in with more
experience.
" One of the things that we discover
in research is that a first-year teacher
spends a whole lot of time learning
the craft, and students ultimately
suffer in that teacher's first year.
But after spending a full year with
a master teacher, they should enter
the profession at a much higher level,
which ultimately benefits students, "
Muri said.
Muri, who began his career as a
teacher, also highlighted that Ector
County is one of three districts in
Texas with its own teacher licensure
program. Along with the two other
districts-Houston and Dallas-
Ector County is uniquely poised to
bring in people who have bachelor's
degrees in subjects other than education
but who want to pursue eduiStock/Getty
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Education Week - March 15, 2023

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