It is tempting to think of these last ESSER funds as one-time expenditures to address limited, one-time needs. A better way to consider these funds would be as a down payment on sustainable strategies.
Whitehall City Schools' mascot is the Ram, which also serves as an acronym for one of Superintendent Sharee Wells' most important philosophies: Relationships always matter.
Solving today's challenge will require something more fundamental than either tech solutions or event planning: people working together to build close-knit school communities.
"We know that one of the most important things we can do to help our students learn is to make sure they come to school consistently and make our families and communities strong partners in this effort," writes U.S. Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.
Sending families positive updates celebrating their child's good attendance, for instance, is something more parents would like to see, a new survey suggests.
.Four years after COVID-19 first hit American schools, we are—thankfully—well past the depths of the crisis. But for education, true recovery from the pandemic has been slow to come.
"Kids are already using it," Superintendent Minerva Garcia-Sanchez says. "To them, it's no big deal. It's us making a big deal of it, and causing it to be more than it really is."
