ESSER Funds Are Gone: Here's How K–12 IT Leaders Replace Them

What the End of ESSER Means for K–12 Technology Budgets

ESSER helped schools navigate the COVID-19 crisis, “It amounted to sometimes as much as $5,000 per student or more,” says Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University and research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy. “But it was one time.”

Now, the ESSER funding cliff challenges school leaders to rethink their approach to IT spending. “We're back to where we were pre-pandemic,” says CoSN CEO Keith Krueger. That means schools will likely need to tighten their belts when it comes to technology.

“You can't do everything,” Krueger says, so the question becomes: “What is the most important in terms of teaching and learning, and what has the biggest impact?”

As districts look to navigate the post-ESSER landscape, those are just the kinds of questions they’ll need to ask.

WATCH: Do more with less in the post-ESSER era.

What To Keep, What To Cut: A Framework for Ed Tech Budget Triage

As schools put together their frameworks for IT budgets going forward, CoSN’s Purposeful Education Technology framework can help them strategize. The guidance there can help schools evaluate technology “to make sure that it's tied to your teaching and learning strategies,” Krueger says.

Much will depend on the role a given tool plays in the classroom. If a technology product is tied directly to the curriculum (tools like the learning management system, for example), that has to stay. “Or if it's a student information system that works with the school’s security system, that may be difficult to unwind,” Roza says.

Likewise, some back-office tech may prove to be essential. Take, for instance, a tool that approves travel expenses. “If they got rid of it, they would have to then add an employee to do that function. That will be harder to cut,” she says.

E-Rate, Title IV and Other Federal Funding Alternatives

As schools look to close the gap, they can explore other funding sources. The E-rate program, for example, continues to help pay for the broadband connectivity that is essential to school operations, Krueger says, “and it's about the fifth-largest K–12 funding program.”

With funding for broadband and Wi-Fi connections, E-rate supports “all the basic plumbing and infrastructure that you need to do digital learning,” he says. In addition, schools can leverage Title IV funds to support technology training, and they may have access to state-level school technology grants.

All this comes with a caveat, however. Funds earmarked for tech needs can end up being spent elsewhere, Roza says. “The district says: Well, we also have these school resource officers, and if we could put them on Title IV, then we don't have to cut them. Suddenly that bumps the technology off.”

As IT leaders seek alternative funding sources, she says, they’ll need to be vocal advocates for where and how those monies are spent.

Stretching Budgets With Managed Services and Device Lifecycle Programs

To make their limited funds go further, IT leaders can look to managed services as well as to device lifecycle programs.

ESSER helped schools to purchase a lot of equipment as they pivoted to one-to-one programs. “But devices wear out after a certain number of years,” Krueger says. “They break down more. They also don't run the latest software.”

A device lifecycle program doesn’t remove the need for periodic refresh cycles, he says, but it can help schools to budget more effectively.

Managed services, meanwhile, can help ensure schools can make the most of the technology they have, especially when IT teams are stretched thin.

With managed services “you can scale up and down the services more readily than if you tried to do it in-house. There is an opportunity there,” Roza says, “especially for smaller districts where they don’t have the money to sustain that service on their own.”

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Building a Sustainable Ed Tech Funding Strategy

Going forward, schools will need to be even more deliberate in their planning. They will need a well-grounded ed tech funding strategy and must work across district leadership teams for braiding funding options and equitable access to digital learning for students.

To build out that plan, it’s important first to make the case that IT is an ongoing need, essential to the learning enterprise. “School district leaders, chief budget officers, CTOs and superintendents have to understand that you need sustainable funding. You can't do it on one-time grant funding,” Krueger says. “You really have to budget appropriately.”

In an increasingly digital world, IT remains the bedrock of school operations. That means IT leaders need to be proactive in their communications. “You have to make the business case to the superintendent and the chief business officer that the network is also running your doors, locks, cameras, your bus schedules and your cafeteria plans,” Krueger said.

IT leaders will also need to speak more clearly than ever about the return on the IT investment and return on learning outcomes to support achievement results.

“If I were a school district, I would want to be absolutely clear on what is the product cost per pupil and what is the expected value,” Roza says. IT funding “is going to be much more tightly connected to whether that investment is delivering measurable value.”