Use of Funds

The Colorado Department of Education is using $125,000 of federally allocated ESSER III funds to plan and deliver professional development opportunities for math teachers in the San Luis Valley.

Poudre School District in Fort Collins spent $100,000 from an Education Workforce Grant to diversify its workforce while at the same time attempting to fill more open positions than the district had in pre-pandemic years.
The majority of the grant paid for a full-time bilingual recruiter with the rest allowing the district to implement an intentional recruitment strategy to increase the number of teachers, which didn’t used to be a problem for the district before the pandemic.

Jefferson County Public Schools is providing free mental health services for students at 155 schools throughout the county with about $1.5 million from the district’s third round of ESSER funds. 

To provide the services, Jeffco is partnering with Hazel Health, a physical and mental telehealth provider, to help students develop coping skills, learn how to self-regulate and increase their resilience.

The Council of Chief State School Officers asked state education chiefs how COVID relief funds had made an impact on their state. Colorado Education Commissioner Katy Anthes explains in this video how she learned of the funds' effectiveness when a school leadership team extolled the funds and how they have helped align math standards to math curriculum for the first time. 

Theatre SilCo in Silverthorne, formerly Lake Dillon Theatre Company, is filling an urgent need for after-school care in Summit County with $528,432 in grant funding from the ESSER III Expanded Learning Opportunities Grant Program.

Kwiyagat Community Academy, the first Colorado charter school on an American Indian reservation, is using $55,000 from the state’s High-Impact Tutoring Grant to help students in populations most affected by the pandemic recover from devastating learning loss.

Project Launch, a full-day summer program that is a collaboration between St. Vrain Valley Schools and four rural districts, is using a $2 million Expanded Learning Opportunities grant from ESSER III to expand the program over the next two years.

The Colorado Department of Education is using $125,000 in ESSER funding to pay for a summer learning series for teachers called CoLabs that will be offered in June in Grand Junction, Greeley and Pueblo.

The Summer Arts & Culture Camp at Museo de las Americas, a program for low-income youth in downtown Denver for the past 13 years, has a waiting list 20 to 30 students every year, which is why organizers hope that pandemic funding through a CDE grant will help make the program more accessible.

Boulder Valley School District, one of the grantees that received ESSER funding to help create an effective teacher mentor program, will have a two-day summer institute for beginning teachers and plans to put teacher mentors in every one of its 56 schools.