ESSER III

Rural school districts in Colorado are being seen as a big part of the solution when it comes to the coming labor shortage that is being predicted in a wide variety of employment areas, including construction, education, health care, hospitality and transportation.

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.

For many urban school districts, students are able to tap into state-of-the-art career technical facilities such as St. Vrain Valley School District’s Innovation Center and Cherry Creek School District’s Innovation Campus.

Students in the East Grand and West Grand school districts have a safe environment to continue learning outside of their regular four-day school week thanks to funding from Colorado’s Expanded Learning Opportunities Grant Program. Colorado AreoLab’s 5th Day Afterschool and summer programs are helping students who struggled during the pandemic improve their math scores and build social emotional skills with project-based STEM education.

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.

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.