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Funding for School Communications
ESSER & Title 1
TL; DR
🏦 The federal gov't has allocated ESSER I & 2 funds to schools for Covid recovery.
🚌 Schools must spend the funds on: student learning loss; technologies for education; Reaching ELL/ML families; providing mental health supports.
🤑 ESSER I funds must be spent by 9/20/22 & ESSER 2 by 9/30/2023
🧑🏾💻 Smore can help with all of it.
An Overview of Federal Funding for School Communications Platforms
The ESSER relief funds for schools are in the process of being disbursed. ESSER I funds must be spent by September 30, 2022, and ESSER II by September 30, 2023.
The grant money must be used to address the following:
- Addressing the unique needs of low-income children, English learners, racial and ethnic minorities, and others
- Addressing students' learning loss
- Providing mental health services and supports
Additionally, 1% of Title 1 funds must be spent on involving parents in their child's education.
Get all faculty communicating consistently
Learn more about how you can use ESSER funds to get principals, comms directors, counselors, teachers, and athletic directors communicating - quickly and efficiently.
How Smore Can Help
1. Student Learning Loss:
- Newsletters can be built around remediation for any skill or content area, and can include a resources, links, and content aimed at addressing areas in which students need extra attention.
- With Smore’s shared mailing lists and collaboration features, teachers can create differentiated newsletters with content and materials that meet the needs of learners where they are.
- Translation features mean that multilingual parents can read the newsletter in their home language, enabling them to better support their child’s learning.
2. Technologies for Educational Interaction
- Smore's media features allow educators to embed photos with ease. Teachers commonly add images of student projects, a snapshot of the lunch menu, or a photo of the lost-and-found.
- Smore supports embedding YouTube videos, as well. Educators often share instructional resources with colleagues, or include videos for parents that address what students are learning in the classroom. Sometimes, they'll record their own updates and embed them in the newsletters themselves.
- PDFs and Office documents can also be shared in Smore newsletters, so things like permission slips or important documents can be easily sent home -- all without touching the bottom of a knapsack.
- It's easy to embed forms or surveys into newsletters, so that educators can have a handle on parent preferences.
- Have parent-teacher conferences coming up? Smore's Event feature allows you to embed events and collect RSVPs.
- Smore has also become part of many educators' toolkits for remote learning. It's easy to make learning interactive -- even from a distance.
3. Reaching ELL/ML Families
- From Arabic to Vietnamese (100+ languages), support multilingual families with templates in their home language.
- With its one-click translation feature, Smore enables schools to communicate effectively with students and their families who are English learners, and who further might be accessing school information via mobile.
- Smore remembers your readers’ preferred browser language and automatically translates the web version of your newsletters for recipients.
4. Provide Mental Health Services and Supports
- Smore enables schools to send home emotional support materials, surveys, and event dates to support families during the pandemic
- It's easy to access and distribute pre-made newsletter templates that feature mental health resources for parents, students, and educators themselves.
- This is all done with the goal of making school communication one less thing to worry about, and enabling educators to focus on themselves and their core responsibilities.
Use ESSER funds to improve school & district-wide communication
Learn more about how you can get principals, comms directors, counselors, teachers, and athletic directors communicating - quickly and efficiently.
Smore