Use of Funds

Welcome to the Colorado Department of Education’s blog about the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, where we will bring you stories about the funding created to address the immediate health and operational challenges of educating students during the Coronavirus pandemic.

Mesa County Valley 51 School District, which comprises the Grand Junction area, is using ESSER funding to develop a robust teacher mentoring program that includes a curriculum-based professional learning framework to help out its new teachers.

The U.S. government provided states $2 trillion from the Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief funds to help school districts recover from the impacts of the pandemic. 

On a dark and chilly November evening at Poudre School District’s IT Center in Fort Collins, more than two dozen first-year teachers have joined their mentors and a group of mentoring coaches to learn more about topics such as how to manage a classroom, best practices for equitable grading, and knowing when and where to seek out support when the going gets tough.

CDE has created an interactive graphic that allows the user to see the common uses of ESSER funds, including ESSER I-3. CDE will be adding different features on its webpage to help provide an easier understanding of how ESSER money has been used in Colorado. 

Find the interactive graphic on the main ESSER webpage. 

Spacing students far enough apart safely was a big concern in Manzanola School District 3J, a rural district on Colorado’s southeastern plains where temperatures can stay in the upper 90s and even above 100 well into October. The state had imposed distancing requirements to limit the spread of the virus, which proved difficult for schools that remained in session.

Chris Smith, superintendent for Ellicott School District 22, which sits east of Colorado Springs in the middle of a vast swath of farms dotting windswept prairie, said that he and his staff felt “an enormous sense of fear” as everything ground to a halt in the spring of 2020. The coronavirus was spreading across the globe, schools were going remote and restrictions on everything from gathering to how close people could stand were being imposed.