Doing More With Less: Preparing for the ESSER Funding Cliff
Next fall’s $190 billion federal funding cliff may be causing almost as many sleepless nights as the pandemic did. For superintendents and other K12 district leaders, early Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds were essential for one-time emergency spending. Later, districts spent more to address learning loss, staffing needs, and other capacity-building to support full recovery.
Assessments of learning loss and equity implications for communities suggest that full recovery from the pandemic is far from finished, even if ESSER funding is ending. It’s easy to build an argument that schools need more base funding to continue to hire and retain educators, restore long-vacant positions for counseling and other student supports, and provide intensive programs for targeted students.
But the reality is that districts and states will have to identify cuts with the end of ESSER funding. The sooner and more thoughtfully districts can begin planning, the better. Budget cuts are unavoidable, but district leadership teams can use this as an opportunity to focus on what is actually important. Four practices can make sure that the cliff doesn’t send you into a free-fall.
Take time to articulate priorities.
From paraprofessionals to the superintendent’s office, educators across all roles agree on one thing: they never have enough money or time. While it’s hard to make more of either, we can choose how we spend both. That means getting distinct about what is most important – not just what’s ideal or urgent – and putting all our energy and resources behind just those things.
The daily urgencies of our work can make it challenging to take the time to identify these top priorities, let alone articulate them for school communities. But it’s an essential first step. If we don’t know our priorities, we can’t protect them — and that means cuts will be felt even more deeply.
De-silo the decision-making process.
Defining “priorities” depends on your perspective. Meeting the needs of 30 individual students and determining what works at the district scale are and should be entirely different viewpoints for decision-making, even when they both seek to center learners’ needs. When those viewpoints aren’t reconciled, leadership teams tend to rely on a combination of mandates, roll-outs, and seeking buy-in to encourage alignment with tough calls.
While leadership requires those tough calls, it need not require tough talk.
The harder the decisions are — and cuts of this type will be very hard — the more important it is to communicate about priorities with others and not just to them.
In over a decade of helping school and district teams tackle challenging changes, our organization has never seen a single “roll-out” of an important decision work smoothly based on an announcement. Rather, it requires consistent and connected communication that links back to the priorities you’ve already discussed together.
The time spent to share ideas, ask questions, and seek input is significant, but it is much less time — and much less stressful time — than the time that leadership teams otherwise need to spend in contentious bargaining tables, staff meetings, public hearings, and press conferences.
Fight the epidemic of “program-itis.”
Even evidence-based programs with robust support from skilled educators can fall short of their promise for students and schools. And that can sometimes be the best-case scenario. Many, if not most, of the programs that districts and schools plan to implement, require extensive (and expensive) training for staff before they can get off the ground or demand total fidelity to work as promised.
Sometimes there are just too many programs to be done well. In one improvement leadership network we have supported, school leadership teams identified more than 30 programs adopted in relatively small elementary schools. When staff are struggling just to name all the programs they have in place, it’s a good bet that they are struggling to run them.
Programs should support students and educators – not the other way around. Budget cuts not only offer us the opportunity to trim away what’s not aligned with priorities and getting results, but also to think about what is really sustainable. No matter how much money you have to spend on potentially effective and helpful programs, too many of them create a deficit of time and energy that contributes to stress, burnout, and attrition while doing little for student learning.
Plan proactively.
K12 education continues to be asked to do more with less. The repercussions of cutbacks are real, as is the stress that these decisions place on district leadership teams and personnel. But we can buffer those impacts if we shift from a focus on scarcity, which engenders feelings of restriction and dread, and replace it with a planned focus on opportunities to shed that programmatic “clutter” in ways that help us serve students better in the long run.
Our book, Small Shifts, Meaningful Change, offers a protocol in Chapter 4 to help you bring all these ideas together to reimagine your resources as part of a single 90-minute meeting. You can find more free tools and discussion guides on Mira Education’s website or contact our team for advice and support.
3 Reflections to Lead School Improvement Planning
The end of the school year calls for both reflection and planning. In the midst of drafting master schedules and reimagining resources, school leadership teams must also take stock of what worked and what no longer serves their students and staff.
Assessing impact in the current year while also planning for the next can be overwhelming. It is even more so when you consider the increasing number of priorities that come with closing out the school year like standardized testing, setting the budget, and end-of-year celebrations – just to name a few.
There is an abundance of “how-tos” and “how-nots” when it comes to school improvement planning, but the expertise needed to make the right decisions for your school or district often lies within your team.
Use these three reflection prompts to unpack this school year and plan for the next.
1. At the beginning of the school year, what was the vision and goals for your students? For your team? How was that vision crafted?
A clear vision and strategy help orient your team and your shared work. Identifying a vision for both achievement and experience is paramount to shifting the work toward your desired outcomes. As you think about your vision for this last school year, recall how it was developed. Was it done alone or were others invited into the process?
By inviting others into the vision and strategy creation process, leadership multiplies. As the next iteration of the vision is developed, leverage the expertise across your team and across roles to increase the ownership of vision, strategy, and outcomes.
2. How did you support your team in the facilitation of this vision?
Supportive administration, whether on the district or the school level, is a key part of retaining talent and expertise. How leaders choose to not just involve staff in the vision and strategy but also support the work is pivotal for both retention and seeing that vision come to fruition. According to the EdWeek Research Center, of educators polled, having a more supportive principal/manager was the top reason they chose to stay in the profession.
As you reflect on this past year, what supports did you and other leaders offer to your team? Where could you shift your practice to be more supportive and attuned to staff needs?
3. How were capacity and resources aligned to support the vision and strategy for the year?
Capacity and resources are finite. That is a universal truth across education and across roles within each district and school. How you organize capacity and resources, however, can significantly impact the realization of your shared vision and strategy.
Consider how your team spent time this year. Was collaboration and planning time prioritized in the schedule? Was there space for cross-team learning? Time is just one of many resources you can leverage in support of your vision. Download our tool, Reimagining Your Resources, to facilitate a 90-minute discussion and recalibrate your resources to your shared vision.
As you dive into reflection, we invite you to extend that into team learning and discussion. Check out our book, Small Shifts, Meaningful Improvement, for additional tools and case studies on how to apply a collective leadership approach to your school improvement planning.
Planning for Shifts: 3 Approaches as ESSER Ends
Education was interrupted in 2020. From virtual learning to Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), the COVID-19 pandemic caused a significant shift in the profession. In response, the federal government bolstered district budgets with COVID relief funds. Now, just four years later, district leaders must shift again as those funds come to an end. Before the next school year, they will make hard decisions around ESSER funding and must pivot to meet the needs of students and staff.
What is ESSER funding?
The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, commonly referred to as ESSER, is a federal program that gave districts nearly $190 billion in response to the pandemic. Districts have until the end of September to commit their share of ESSER funds and will have until January 2025 to spend them.
For some districts, ESSER funds allowed for new construction in response to growing communities. For others, it meant hiring more staff to support student needs. No matter where districts invested their funding, the time is coming for district leaders to make shifts in order to maintain momentum.
Planning for Shifts: 3 Approaches as ESSER Ends
Shifts in how districts and schools operate without ESSER funding are inevitable. Cuts are coming, if not already here. But instead of embracing a scarcity mindset, district and school leaders can proactively plan for change. These shifts won’t happen overnight and may be uncomfortable, but they present themselves as an opportunity to re-engage the people who make the work of districts and schools possible – educators.
1. Revisit Your Vision
In your leadership practice, how you approach vision and strategy is as important as the vision and strategy you set. Intentionally invite your team to help co-create the vision and strategy for next year. Though resources are shifting, what you decide as a team is priority will help you gain insight into where to make shifts.
At Manning High School, for example, after experiencing a year of growth, their team wanted to build on that momentum. In the 2023-2024 school year, they came together to rally behind a vision to Watch Achievement Rise or their “W.A.R.” cry to increase student outcomes. By engaging their entire school community in a vision of excellence, they saw a positive impact on report card metrics, discipline, attendance, and enrollment.
As you establish vision and strategy, use this facilitation guide to identify and connect with a range of team members and invite them into the decision-making process.
2. Reimagine Your Resources
After you’ve co-created the vision and strategy with your team, aligning resources is a critical next step to not only seeing that vision come to fruition but also sustaining shifts in your work. How you make strategic sense of existing programs and initiatives will allow you to let go of what’s no longer serving your team and make space for more of what is moving you closer to the set vision.
Walker-Gamble Elementary, an under-resourced school in rural South Carolina, has approached their resources in a way that centers teacher time and student outcomes. By making shifts in their master schedule, every teacher has at least five hours each week for professional learning and collaboration, 75 percent of students experience 1:1 instruction, and every student and educator sets data-informed personalized learning goals at least quarterly (Byrd et al., 2023). By making small shifts in their schedule and reimagining how they work together with their existing resources, Walker-Gamble received South Carolina’s top recognition for schools, the Palmetto’s Finest award in 2020.
Use this activity protocol to guide your thinking and reflect on existing programs and resources with your team. You will need up to 90 minutes for this work.
3. Embrace Fresh Perspectives
Finally, the work of leaders should not be done alone. As ESSER funding comes to an end, invite new perspectives into the planning and implementation of shifts in your shared work. By de-siloing the work to be done, your team becomes co-owners of your outcomes, strategy and vision, multiplying the leadership across your team.
In Richland County School District Two, district leaders are tapping into teacher expertise as part of the planning process for the next school year. To increase teacher engagement in decision-making, they have asked teachers to develop master schedules for the next year to center teacher capacity and time needs.
Creating change and improvement in schools and districts is complex, challenging work. Use this discussion tool with your team to gain insight into your work together.
From Planning to Action
As you prepare for shifts in the new school year, continue to engage your team in the design and implementation of solutions. You can find more free tools and resources on our website or contact our team for thought partnership and support.
Coaching to Identify Problems
As educators, intentionality with our time, resources, and goals is essential to create a balance that not only benefits ourselves but those we lead. From meetings to budgets and all the important decisions in between, and especially those that directly impact our scholars, our focus must remain in the right place.
It’s an ambitious task but not impractical.
To remain focused on our goals and keep scholars at the forefront, we must be intentional about how we not only use our time, but where. In order to do that, we must identify one singular priority and the best way to accomplish the desired outcome. Moreover, as leaders we must invite others into the work to focus on that one priority.
Through coaching and the coaching relationship, we can narrow in on a specific topic or need and support priority setting. Coaching allows us, as leaders, to improve our capabilities, enhance our effectiveness, and maximize our personal and professional potential within our organizations (Nicolau et al., 2023).
Whether it is needing more time in the day, improving communication, or maximizing workflows, identifying the specific need is the first step to solving any problem and aligning priorities. Coaching your team to identify problems is an essential part of leading schools. By leveraging your lived experience and collective expertise, you are better equipped to address the whole problem and not just a piece of it.
Are You Diagnosing the Problem or Symptom?
I remember a specific moment during my time as an assistant principal when a highly respected teacher shared that she would not be returning to our campus in the fall. It was shocking. In my office, I prompted and, of course, wondered why. Ultimately, she wanted more uninterrupted time at home with her family. She felt that teaching did not provide the balance she was seeking. Her story is not unlike that of many other educators who choose to leave the profession. Limited capacity and resources is a common pain point in education, so how can we leverage coaching to address a need that seems insurmountable?
For starters, we must identify the root cause – the area we should prioritize in order to solve the problem. Her desire for balance was not inherently about teaching or being a teacher, rather, it was about a lack of time. How, as the school leader, could I have supported her in finding more time during contract hours for her to accomplish the tasks she was taking home? What shifts in our practice could we have implemented to help create the balance she was seeking?
Going Beyond Addressing Symptoms
Understanding the underlying priority means that we’ve identified the correct problem. Through a coaching relationship, identifying the specific priority of focus can be less challenging, even when there seem to be multiple priorities demanding attention. Coaching conversations allow for open and fluid discussion. While a technical response to identifying a problem is helpful, using coaching to identify a problem reveals other essential insights.
But determining the priority can be challenging. It’s in our nature to respond directly to a symptom – rather than the root cause. Imagine a headache caused by a lack of sleep. Instead of taking a break, our immediate response is to take an aspirin to treat the symptom – the headache.
Treating symptoms works in the short term because we can alleviate the headache and continue with our day. However, if we’re not resting enough over time, the pain compounds. In the same way that aspirin won’t result in more rest, only addressing the symptom of a problem won’t result in resolution. Identifying and addressing the root cause allows you to create a plan that focuses on the problem and not simply the symptoms.
Leverage Coaching to Identify the Problem
I invite you to lean into coaching to identify that singular priority. Use the questions below to guide your thinking toward identifying the root challenge you are facing instead of just the symptom.
This realization may be different than your original thoughts, or there could be multiple priorities that are causing the same less-than-desirable pain point. It is helpful to understand your true priority of focus because you can begin addressing it with your team. Once there is clarity around that singular focus, having support through coaching for a specific priority can help achieve the desired outcome.
- What are the primary challenges or obstacles you have encountered recently related to your priority of focus?
- How are these challenges impacting your daily and long-term goals?
- What outcomes or changes would you like to see as a result of addressing these challenges?
Tools to Identify Your Priority
It can seem natural to start solving a problem before truly identifying the cause. There can be a fear that too much time spent identifying the problem can be wasteful when the opposite is true. By rushing to solve a problem, we may be addressing the wrong issue (Spradlin, 2019).
Shifting from a mindset of addressing the symptom to the underlying problem can involve a strategic and pragmatic approach. Allow identifying the symptom to serve as the first step toward addressing your problem and identifying a pattern to be the next.
What other trends related to the symptoms are revealing themselves? As you begin identifying your priority, it may be helpful to employ tools that are already familiar such as a Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) Analysis.
Using a problem-solving tool is a place to collect data as it relates to the symptom and identify the potential root cause. Once the data is collected and the root cause is identified, it is time to prioritize the challenge.
Through coaching conversations and reflection, the true priority is identified. Solutions for problem-solving and next steps are created with your team, and desired outcomes become tangible practices. Eliciting the support of individuals who can guide you through the process of identifying the actual problem maximizes time and resources.
Works Cited
Nicolau, A., Candel, O. S., Constantin, T., & Kleingeld, A. (2023, May 9). The effects of executive coaching on behaviors, attitudes, and personal characteristics: A meta-analysis of Randomized Control Trial Studies. Frontiers. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1089797/full
Spradlin , D. (2019, August 23). Are you solving the right problem?. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2012/09/are-you-solving-the-right-problem
2023 End of Year Report
As 2023 comes to an end, we’re looking back at the work accomplished and are inspired by what’s to come. The End of Year Report highlights the impact of our work in 2023.
This year, we met several milestones as an organization, including publishing a new book, Small Shifts, Meaningful Improvement, developing free tools for leading change and improvements in districts, and working alongside our partners to increase teacher retention, bolster school improvement efforts, and make sustainable changes across schools and districts.
Read the full report below and connect with us on social media for more updates and resources for school improvement and education leadership.
Reflecting and Reframing: How a mindset shift helped this school leader focus on what matters most
Principals are key players in the delicate and ever-evolving ecosystem of a school’s culture and growth.
School leadership matters. Second only to teachers as a primary in-school influence on student success, principals are key players in the delicate and ever-evolving ecosystem of a school’s culture and growth.
We had the pleasure of catching up with a passionate educator, leader, and member of the Mira Education community: Vanessa Valencia, former Assistant Principal at Vista Peak Exploratory in Aurora, Colorado. Vanessa shared important insights from her leadership journey with us.
Read on to learn how a shift in mindset has helped her remain joyful, flexible, and solution-oriented in the face of systemic challenges and competing demands.
Q: What’s a typical “day in the life” of a school leader? How has your view of the role shifted from your first year as a school leader to the present?
A: Every day is different. Like teaching, your best “plan” doesn’t always (or ever) go as planned. You can have a full schedule of commitments, and one event, emergency, or unexpected hallway conversation can take the day in a completely different direction. The role requires immense flexibility. When I first started, I struggled when a day didn’t go as planned. I felt like I was always letting someone down. Now I approach the day from an ‘I don’t know how this day is going to go’ mindset. This has impacted how I show up — in classrooms, meetings, and one-on-one conversations — in a positive way.
I’ve come to realize school leadership is incredibly creative work. I’ve been at my school since it opened seven years ago, which has allowed me to observe growth and improvement over time. Schools are constantly iterating, refining, and co-creating systems. This is why staff retention and growing leaders committed to the school community are so important. Focusing on this, the fact that at its core, school leadership is about creating better learning experiences for kids helps me remain flexible and responsive to each day’s demands.
Q: What brings you joy in your work?
A: Witnessing the development and growth in a teacher’s practice and its impact on student learning. For example, one member of our staff was an effective teacher, yet very traditional, a few years ago. Her classroom was always on-task and compliant but didn’t necessarily reflect the cognitive engagement she knew was possible. I worked with her, initially as her coach and eventually as her evaluator. Today her classroom is completely different. Every day she offers students opportunities for interactive and hands-on learning, and cognitive engagement is high. Seeing authentic student engagement and the growth in her teaching, and knowing I played a role in impacting her practice, brings me great joy.
While instructional leadership has always been really important to me, I made it the primary focus of my daily work. As an assistant principal, I spent as much time in classrooms as possible. When I started working as a school leader, I was so worried about completing tasks as they came in that my inbox consumed large chunks of the work day.
Through reflection and conversations with my colleagues, I realized a clean inbox is never going to impact student achievement! This shift in mindset helped me reframe where and how I should be spending my time.
Prioritizing being in classrooms resulted in stronger relationships with staff, a deeper understanding of each educator’s professional growth goals, and an increase in timely and specific feedback to each staff member I evaluated. This feedback has resulted in more risk-taking and implementation of the feedback by teachers in classrooms. It shifted the culture from one of compliance to one where teachers say, ‘I’m trying something new today. Can you come watch?’
Q: Mira Education believes unleashing the collective capacity of teachers and administrators is the key to creating an equitable public school system that serves all students and their communities. What is your reaction to this? How does this value show up in the work you do?
A: I couldn’t agree more that we must work to remove the line that still exists between teachers and administrators. We cannot be divided if we are serious about serving all students. We must view and respect each other as professionals and leverage the collective genius that exists within our system.
One of the ways we’re doing this is through our professional learning studio structure. As a teacher, it was frustrating to me when professional learning didn’t mirror the instructional practice expected in classrooms. This made me realize our professional learning must model what we expect — if we want differentiated and personalized learning for students, we must orchestrate what that might look like with adults. Choice, and teachers’ real inquiry questions and problems of practice, should always drive professional learning. All studio-based learning that happened in our building happens through other teachers, including collaboration with practitioners at other schools.
Keeping a “teacher mindset” at the forefront and constantly reflecting on what it was like to be a full-time practitioner helped me co-create meaningful professional learning experiences with staff.
Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
