Local Priorities

Adam Hartman, superintendent of the Cañon City School District, wanted to provide financial transparency so everyone in his small community could find out how the district was spending the $331,335 it received in federal pandemic Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding.  

A professional-grade espresso machine and an ice cream maker may not seem like educational tools, but with a $3,000 ESSER Rural Program Development grant, the West Grand School District has turned them into teaching machines.

West Grand’s money used the funding to bolster its Career and Technical Education classes, which were disrupted during the pandemic. Remote learning was no substitute for the hands-on learning the program provides.

One goal for ESSER was to help students get up to speed and improve learning once schools reopened. The partnership with UVA, Crawford said, gave teachers strategies to help students catch up.

“It's figuring out which kids are behind and why. Learning data planning for interventions,” he said

Students in Edison School District No. 54 are learning industrial arts skills to repurpose an old school bus into a habitable home using ESSER funds that were available to rural school districts for strengthening student engagement.

The tiny 112-student school district in Yoder was one of 47 Colorado rural school districts that applied for money from the $141,000 Rural Program Development grant.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis today announced additional funding for Colorado teachers to access the DonorsChoose Program funding. This opportunity was created by the Governor’s allocation of $6.7 million from the Governor's Emergency Education Relief (GEER) fund to the DonorsChoose program which provides $1,000 to teachers for classroom supplies and resources to improve students’ learning experiences.

Nearly 13,000 Colorado teachers applied for and received more than $11 million in classroom supplies in an initiative that used ESSER II funding to help pre-K through 12th grade public school educators address COVID-19 learning loss.

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.

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.