For Evangelina Mendoza, chief information technology officer for the San Antonio Independent School District in Texas, the looming end of federal pandemic relief funding presents some tough choices.
Part of that will involve the San Antonio Independent School District, a metropolitan area with about 45,000 students, overhauling all of the educational technology purchases it made during the pandemic.
That means switching from a strategy of giving teachers more tools to a strategy of prioritizing taking some away. For example, the district eliminated the videoconferencing platform Zoom. “People said, ‘How on earth are you going to take away Zoom?’” Mendoza said, adding, “That was costing us $100,000 a year, and we’re not going to have that anymore.”
Even if some teachers want Zoom, it’s a financial decision. This year, districts have seen huge increases in subscription costs for even “basic” tools like Microsoft Office, Mendoza said. That’s a change, as many companies have kept prices down during the pandemic. Zoom is K-12 schools are free That was the case at one time, but not anymore, and the relief money the district used to pay subscription fees is disappearing.
As a result, even tools that were once considered automatic updates are now subject to phase-out and must prove their value, Mendoza said. That has led districts to scrutinize “redundant systems,” where multiple tools may be used to accomplish the same purpose. That makes it harder these days to justify the cost of Zoom when districts are already paying subscription fees that include another virtual conferencing platform, Microsoft Teams, Mendoza said.
“[Before] “Before, we had the Cadillac version of a particular piece of software, but now we have to reevaluate every time there’s an update,” she says.
While each school district has its own struggles, San Antonio’s is not unique: The end of federal relief funds and pressures from declining student enrollment have forced some K-12 districts to cut technology budgets, but how that’s impacting them seems to vary.
Depressed
The forced switch to distance learning due to the pandemic has temporarily forced the government $190 billion vaccine With the development of available vaccines in hopes of preventing the impact of COVID-19 on teaching and learning, school districts are using much of their Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) funding to pay for staff hire, tutoring, and other costs. Facility Improvementsbut they found that the money could also help buy educational technology. 1 Federal Report It’s estimated that 92 percent of local schools have used ESSER funds to purchase hardware like Chromebooks, software and internet-connected tools like mobile hotspots to continue instruction during the pandemic.
Many schools have struggled over the past few months to return to in-person instruction due to tight budgets, staff shortages and chronic student absenteeism. Now, schools face a tough deadline to take advantage of bonus resources. Federal relief funds for K-12 schools were released at the end of September. Sunset ScheduleThe U.S. Department of Education Extension request approved.
This means that the education technology industry boomed during the pandemic but is now in decline.
As the end of the emergency funds nears, school tech purchases are returning to historically normal levels, said Reg Leichty, founding partner at Foresight Law + Policy, an outside law firm that lobbies for the Consortium of School Networks (CoSN), a membership organization focused on K-12 technology.
Decreasing budgets will put more pressure on district technology leaders to think seriously about how to maintain technology and internet access, Leichty said.
But exactly what that looks like varies from district to district.
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer for how school districts should approach this issue, argues Carla Wade, CoSN’s senior director of external relations. How this impacts districts will depend on how they handled the money in the first place and whether they planned for this as short-term funding, Wade said.
Schools have already not renewed their contracts because of the disappearance of ESSER funding. Understandably, Wade said, schools often prioritize staff. But parents want technology available to students, so districts have to balance that with all the other priorities for funding. “So it’s going to be a challenge,” Wade said.
So how are other districts dealing with this?
Turning mountains into molehills
In some areas, the effects of the cuts will be delayed.
Steve Langford, chief information officer for Oregon’s Beaverton School District, said the district is in a fortunate position.
The city, just west of Portland, is home to Nike’s world headquarters and is generally a “tech-forward city” where tech skills are valued, Langford adds. For one thing, voters passed bonds in 2014 and 2022 to cover the cost of network connectivity and student devices, so the district’s tech capabilities were less reliant on federal bailout funds when the pandemic hit. That also meant they could use the bailout funds for instructional tools and operational applications, rather than devices, he says.
The district also decoupled staff salaries from ESSER funding and began finding other ways to support pay in anticipation of federal funding drying up, relieving some pressure on Langford to make deep cuts.
Still, the district is not immune to impacts, Langford said.
This fall, a team from the IT department, the business office and several people with education expertise will evaluate the effectiveness of the tools available to the Beaverton School District based on internal data on student and teacher usage. Langford’s office is looking at how often educational technology is opened and how it is used to try to determine which products are worth the cost, he said. By February, that analysis should be compiled into a budget recommendation that will ask for funding for subscriptions that need to continue. So the recommendation will probably be in effect for the next school year, Langford estimated.
However, for teachers in schools affected by these decisions, their ability to influence choices may be somewhat limited.
Langford’s team, which includes teachers and administrators, solicits feedback from other teachers and schools, he says, and if a software package needs to be phased out, he adds, they work with teachers to figure out how to adjust (such as identifying other software tools that can address similar needs and providing training resources for alternative software if necessary) and to try to better understand why it was phased out.
This isn’t a one-time thing; this evaluation is something districts need to do on a regular basis, Langford says. While reduced funding due to declining student enrollment contributes to the need for this practice, it’s also a good way to ensure that the “software portfolio” a district invests in is aligned with its curricular needs, he adds, explaining that skeptically evaluating edtech purchases to determine whether they’re worth the price helps hold them accountable for making investments worthwhile for teachers and students.
But Langford is hopeful that with a little advance planning, “cliffs can turn into hills” in funding. While funding cuts are always difficult, he says, taking a thoughtful approach to evaluating applications is a powerful tool to reduce the uncertainty that comes with them and also help with learning.
The story is different in other school districts that were less prepared for the switch to distance learning.
Borrowed Things
The small rural school district of Altoona, Wisconsin, had to scramble for funds to cover the huge costs of moving students online during the early days of the pandemic.
Sarah Radcliffe, the district’s director of future-oriented learning, said the district has had to “take money away from other areas” to accommodate remote learning for students. For example, because students are no longer bused to school, the district temporarily redirected funds from transportation to more pressing remote learning needs, Radcliffe said.
“And it was stressful to do so,” she added.
Pandemic relief funds, especially Emergency Connectivity Fund ESSER is a multibillion-dollar federal program aimed at helping schools get students online. The announcement of the program came as a relief to school districts, Radcliffe said: They can use the money for hotspots and related expenses, and use ESSER funds to make up for money they’ve taken from other parts of their budgets in the scramble to get students online.
But that relief did not mean the problem was solved.
For Altoona, devices remain an issue. They bought so many of them at once that it totally messed up the technology replacement cycle, Radcliff says. And now maintenance is a concern because the district can’t afford to replace so many devices at once. Instead, Radcliff is trying to extend the lifespan of these devices. Previously, they replaced devices every four years if they could, if they weren’t needed for state testing, but now they’re trying to extend that lifespan to six years. That means students have to use the old devices, and younger kids can’t take them home, Radcliff says.
Additionally, like other school districts, Altoona needed to evaluate whether the software was living up to its potential as companies tried to lure schools away from free accounts.
According to Radcliffe, there is no set path to eliminating technology. In reality, she is the decision-maker, as the district has given her autonomy. But she found a process she liked that focused on building “buy-in.” When deciding whether to cut technology for the 2022-2023 school year, Radcliffe organized a “stakeholder group” that all teachers could participate in. She invited teachers who were interested to give their input, and they inspected all the software purchased by the district. After evaluating how the software related to curriculum and instructional methods, they had the vendors give presentations on their products. Then, Radcliffe said, teachers evaluated how well the software represented the district’s needs.
Radcliffe says the process was generally unanimous because they laid out exactly what they wanted up front. They worked out specific criteria to determine what teachers needed to accomplish with the instructional software before giving vendors the opportunity to sell their products, and it was key to be “platform agnostic” at the start, Radcliffe says.
Radcliffe thinks it worked.
It’s also the kind of work that has come to define her job these days. Before, Radcliffe thought her role was to convince teachers of the value of using technology in education. Today, that’s a given. She once had to convince teachers to use learning management software, but now she doubts that many of the teachers she knows could do their jobs without it.
Despite budgetary pressures caused by the end of ESSER support, the past few years have been a boon for technology’s presence in schools, some observers say.
This investment has brought about lasting change, embedding technology more deeply into schools than ever before, lobbyist Leichty argues. The end of an unprecedented boost in federal relief funding may dampen schools’ appetite for technology experimentation, but the overall infrastructure for using technology in education may have permanently expanded, Leichty said.
