As Federal Dollars Vanish, Districts Weigh Which Edtech Tools to Drop

While each district has its own travails, San Antonio’s struggle isn’t unique. Under pressure from the end of federal relief money and declining student enrollment, some K-12 school districts now have to make tech cuts. But how that’s impacting these districts seems to vary.

The Come Down

The pandemic’s forced switch to remote instruction unlocked federal funding for K-12 schools, as the government made a temporary $190 billion jab available in the hopes that it would inoculate against the effects of COVID-19 on teaching and learning. Districts expended much of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) money on hiring staff, paying for tutoring and improving facilities, but they also found the money useful for purchasing edtech, with one federal report estimating that 92 percent of local schools used ESSER funds to buy hardware like Chromebooks, software and internet connectivity tools like mobile hot spots to continue instruction during the pandemic.

Many schools have had a rocky return to in-person teaching and learning over the past many months, marked by strained budgets, understaffing and chronically absent students. Now, they’re facing a stark deadline for making use of their bonus resources. At the end of September, federal relief dollars for K-12 schools are scheduled to sunset, though the U.S. Education Department is greenlighting extension requests.

That means that while the edtech industry took off during the pandemic, it’s now coming down.

With the emergency funding close to its end, school tech purchases are returning to historically normal levels, says Reg Leichty, a founding partner at Foresight Law + Policy, an outside law firm that lobbies for the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), a member organization focused on tech in K-12.

Fewer dollars puts more pressure on district tech leaders to be really thoughtful about how they are sustaining tech and access to the internet, Leichty says.

But precisely what that looks like depends on the district.

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer for how districts should approach this, argues Carla Wade, senior director of external relations for CoSN. How this affects districts will depend on how they handled the money in the first place, and whether they planned for this being short-term funding, Wade says.

Vanishing ESSER funds have already caused schools to not renew contracts. Understandably, their priority is often on staff, Wade says. But parents have expectations now for tech being available for students, so districts are going to have to balance that with all the other priorities for the funding. “So it’s going to be a struggle,” Wade says.

So how are other districts handling it?

Mountains Into Molehills

In some areas, the cuts will have a delayed impact.

Beaverton School District, in Oregon, finds itself in a fortunate place, according to Steve Langford, chief information officer for the district.

Sitting just west of Portland, the city houses Nike World Headquarters and is generally “tech forward,” a place where tech skills are valued, Langford adds. An example: Voters passed bonds in 2014 and 2022 that paid for network connectivity and student devices, meaning the school district’s tech capability wasn’t as reliant on federal relief funding when the pandemic hit. It also meant they were able to use relief funding on instructional tools and operational applications rather than devices, he says.

The district also started transitioning staff salaries away from ESSER funding, finding other ways to support wages in anticipation of the depleted federal dollars, relieving some pressure on Langford to make deep cuts.

Still, the district won’t be unaffected, Langford says.

This fall, a team from IT, the business office and some people with teaching expertise will appraise the effectiveness of the tools available in Beaverton School District based on internal data about student and teacher use. Looking at how often edtech is opened, as well as how it’s used, Langford’s office is trying to determine which products are worth the cost, he says. By February, that analysis should be turned into budget recommendations asking for funding for subscriptions that need to continue. So the recommendations would likely take effect in the next school year, Langford estimates.

But for teachers in schools affected by these decisions, their ability to influence the choice may be somewhat limited.

Langford’s team — which includes some teachers and administrators — solicits feedback from other teachers and schools, he says. If a software package needs to go away, he adds, they work with teachers on how to make adjustments — such as figuring out what other software tools are out there that can serve a similar need and providing resources to train them on the alternative software when necessary — and try to promote an understanding of why the cut was made.

This isn’t a one-off. This evaluation is an exercise the district will have to perform on a recurring basis, Langford says. Declining funding from decreased student enrollment will contribute to the need for the habit, but it’s also a good practice for making sure the “software portfolio” a district invests in is aligned with curricula needs, he adds, explaining that skeptically evaluating edtech purchases to determine if they are worth the price helps fulfill the responsibility to make worthwhile investments for teachers and students.

But Langford hopes that with a little advanced planning, the funding “cliff becomes a hill.” Funding decreases are always challenging, he says, but having a thoughtful approach to evaluating applications is a powerful tool for mitigating the uncertainties that come with that and also for learning, he says.

It’s a different story in other districts that were less prepared for the remote learning switch.

Something Borrowed

A small, rural school district in Wisconsin, Altoona had to quickly find money to cover the steep cost of getting students online during the early days of the pandemic.

It pushed them to “rob funds from other areas” to make sure students were able to learn remotely, says Sarah Radcliffe, the director of future-ready learning for the district. For example, since students weren’t being bused into school, the district temporarily shifted money from transportation to more immediate remote learning needs, she says.

“And it was stressful to do so,” she adds.

When pandemic relief funding, especially the Emergency Connectivity Fund — a multibillion-dollar federal program meant to help schools get students online — was announced, it caused relief, Radcliffe says. It meant the school district could lean on those dollars for hot spots and related expenses and use ESSER funds to make up for the money they had raided from elsewhere in the budget in the dizzying rush to get students online.

But that relief didn’t mean the trouble was over.

For Altoona, devices are still an issue. Purchasing a lot of devices at one time completely messed up the tech replacement cycles, Radcliffe says, and now maintenance has become a concern, because the district can’t afford to replace so many devices all at once. Instead, Radcliffe is trying to extend the life of those devices. Where she might have swapped them out every four years before — where she can, when the devices aren’t required for state testing — she’s now trying to extend that lifespan to six years. It means students will have to use older devices, and younger children don’t get to take them home, she says.

Plus, just like in other districts, Altoona also had to gauge whether software was living up to its potential since companies have tried to wean schools off free accounts.

There isn’t a well-worn path for discontinuing tech, according to Radcliffe. In practice, the district gives Radcliffe autonomy, so she’s the decision-maker. But she’s found a process she likes, one that focuses on building “buy-in.” When deciding whether to cut tech in the 2022-2023 school year, Radcliffe put together a “stakeholder group” open to all teachers. She invited any teacher who was interested to give input, and they inspected all the software the district had purchased. After evaluating the software for how it connected to their curriculum and instructional practices, they had vendors give presentations about their products. Then, Radcliffe says, the teachers rated how well the software had demonstrated what the district needed.

Because the process spelled out precisely what they were looking for in advance, the decisions were usually unanimous, Radcliffe says. It was important to be “platform agnostic” at first, looking at specific criteria to decide what teachers need the instructional software to accomplish before giving vendors a chance to sell their product, Radcliffe says.

It has worked well, Radcliffe thinks.

It’s also the kind of task that’s come to define her job lately. Previously, Radcliffe felt her role was to convince teachers of the value of using tech in education. These days, that’s a given. She once had to persuade teachers to use learning management software, but now she doubts whether many teachers she knows could do their job without it.

Even with budget pressures brought on by the end of ESSER support, the last few years have been a boon for the presence of tech in schools, some observers say.

The investment has left permanent changes, embedding tech more deeply into schools than ever, Leichty, the lobbyist, argues. While the end of the unprecedented boost from federal relief funding may slow down schools’ willingness to experiment with tech, Leichty says, the overall infrastructure for using tech in instruction may have permanently expanded.