ESSER III FUNDS: A look at Sioux City Comm. School District's allocation of $38.9 Million

The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Funds, or ESSER funds, have helped school districts nationwide recover from the pandemic. Sioux City Schools is no different.
Let's take a look at the District's ESSER funding so far:

ESSER I
WHEN: Spring 2020
AMOUNT: $2.6 million
USE: Personal Protective Equipment and Cleaning Supplies

ESSER II
WHEN: December 2020
AMOUNT: $17.3 million
USE: More PPE, cleaning supplies. Plus, additional technology to make sure every student and educator had access to technology for virtual and in-person learning. 

ESSER III
WHEN: March 2021
AMOUNT: $38.9 million
USE: To Be Determined

The district school board, the community and school officials have discussed many options to use the nearly $39 million in ESSER III funding.

During Monday's school board meeting, the board will be presented with a plan on how to best spend the allocated funds. Siouxland News got a preview of that proposal from district superintendent Dr. Paul Gausman and Assistant Superintendent Dr. Kim Buryanek. 

"First of all, we're here to serve students," said Dr. Gausman, "that's our number one principle and so, we've got to take a look at the students and figure out ways in which we can serve them to help them grow."

At least 20% of the $39 million must be used to address pandemic learning loss. With this proposal, the district is allocating more than $15 million, or 40% of its budget.

ADDRESSING LEARNING LOSS

"We've got to take a look at where our students' learning loss has occurred where are the biggest challenges, what subgroup of students is the largest subgroup that is witnessed we've witnessed the greatest learning loss," Dr. Gausman said. 

This school year is the 3rd under the COVID-19 bubble and the impact the virus has had on kids' education is already being seen.

"We see an impact of COVID in our early grades," Dr. Buryanek said of the pandemic's already-felt impact in the district. "There are some foundational skills that students two years ago when they were in second grade or two years ago in first grade, they just missed out on some learning, and now we're seeing the impact of that in our student achievement scores."

Part of the 40% will be distributed to other organizations that help student achievement. According to government data, 70% of the district's student body lives in poverty.

"If we can equalize the challenges of poverty, we will equalize those scores across racial and ethnic groups, and across those who are learning the English language." Dr. Gausman said, "and so, I really believe that's a civil rights issue for our time to look at serving those students in poverty."

Monday night's board meeting will also give the public a first look at student testing data and while preliminary, can help guide the school board and district in the right direction to best help students and teachers.

"And when we look at that data, yes we can see some different performance levels among subgroups might be racial groups or ethnic groups, but where we really see the largest challenge is students in poverty," Dr. Gausman said. 

One way the district hopes to help student achievement is through summer home visits. These voluntary visits will bring a student's teacher to their front door, creating a stronger relationship between the student, their teacher and the family as a whole.

Dr. Buryanek said this voluntary visit could do great things for students and staff. "Research studies have been done on home visit programs and those studies show that there is an increase in attendance, there's an increase in parent and student engagement when a successful home visit programs are enacted in schools."

The district also has a plan to help their teachers with their own professional learning time.

"We've allocated an additional hour a week, that if teachers want to, they can come in, outside of their contract day and work with other teachers of their grade level or their content area and really take a look at students and their proficiency, who is struggling as a student, what can they do differently to help impact their student achievement," Dr. Buryanek said. 

THE OTHER 24 MILLION

But now the challenge is how to best use the remaining $24 million.

"Anytime we have a real opportunity like this one, we need to model," Dr. Gausman said about him, the district and the school board. "We as adults working to solve these challenges and use this opportunity. We need to model for our students and our community, how adults deal with challenges..

"This is a challenge because it's one-time money. We can't spend this money over and over again well beyond the 2024 timeline and so we have to be careful about that." One of the largest allocations is slated to be used to hire more educators. The district wants to hire around 45 new teachers to help reduce class sizes district-wide. They’ve set aside $7.5 million for those new hires over the next three years.

"Our board has been very clear with us about this, however, that anything you put in here has got to be sustainable, one way or another and yes, we've got a number of staffing positions in there, and yes this money will go away eventually," Gasman said, "but we do have a process design where we can do our best to sustain as many of those members of our personnel, as we move forward."

Another position is a Family Support Coordinator.

"We know that families in our community have been challenged have challenges with COVID," Dr. Buryanek said, "and so we want to make sure that they have somebody that they can reach out to in our school district that will help connect them with support and resources."

The budget also allocated $3.25 million for permanent substitute teachers within the district.

Another large line item is upgrades and additions to the district H-VAC systems with $7.5 million also allocated to that project. One part of that project is adding air conditioning to the gyms at East, North and West High, the only areas within the school buildings not cooled. They also hope to bring better air quality to all buildings district-wide.

"We want to install a district-wide UV system to treat the air as it comes into our building, to help cut down and prevent any viruses," said Dr. Buryanek, "and not only are we talking about COVID viruses, but it also has an impact on any students that have asthma or other upper respiratory illnesses or challenges. 

"It really will make a long term improvement well into the future that, that we can sustain." Along with improvements to air quality, comes sustaining the heightened cleaning that the district has had to do since the start of the pandemic. They've allocated nearly $650,000 to hire more than a dozen new custodial staff to help keep the district buildings clean. The district has stepped up cleaning protocols in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Another district improvement in the proposal is a $1.5 million project to house the new VIBE Academy, the district's new permanent virtual learning school.

"It's paramount," Buryaken said, "it's very important for them to be together in the same space so they can collaborate. They can have conversations about students that are struggling and get them connected back to the school or to resources that will ensure their success."

One other budget item allocates $80,000 to purchase rapid COVID-19 tests, creating rapid testing sites at each district building for students and staff. These tests would only be given to students with written parent permission. This line item has also been widely praised by many in the district and community.

"So with the board's approval or acknowledgment of this budget," Bruyanek said, "hopefully Monday night, we plan to move forward with acquiring rapid COVID tests on Tuesday."

Monday's proposal to the school board is just that. A proposal. With each item and project being approved as needed throughout the next three years.

"This is a budget that plans on how we're going to spend money all the way into 2024," Dr. Gausman said. "The currently seated board won't be here, necessarily, then and that board that's here in 2024 might have different ideas then. So I don't think that it's just Monday that we might make some alterations, I think you'll see us bringing this back in front of the board on a regular basis between now and the end of the resources."

Overall, Gausman and Buryanek say this plan and the hours dedicated to developing it, has first and foremost student success in mind.

"We want to make sure that we use this money wisely and we have the greatest impact on students and student achievement that we possibly can."

The Sioux City School Board meeting begins at 6 p.m. at the district's downtown building and is open to the public. 

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