RIVER FALLS – River Falls School District has been working on a recovery plan in response to COVID-19 setbacks in schools. The district has formed a task force to outline a plan for recovery following the pandemic and will be using government funding to implement the plan over the next three years.

The task force was formed to receive feedback and ideas for what the district needs to focus on in the upcoming school years to recover from any learning loss that COVID and distance learning has caused. During the past year the River Falls School District had about 400 students utilizing online learning.

The task force included building administrators as well as staff from all schools in the district. The mission of the group is, “to provide recommendations, focused on academics and instruction, to support positive student learning opportunities that will minimize the achievement gap for ALL students.”

The plan is being funded by the Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds that have been dispersed through COVID relief packages from the federal government.

There are three different forms of this funding, and the River Falls School District has received eligibility for all of them.

All three parts of the ESSER funds have similar eligible expenditures. The government expects districts to plan on using at least 10 percent of this funding for learning loss. The River Falls School District plans to use a portion for their learning loss recovery plan.

The approved funding from these relief packages for the River Falls School District included $174,091 from ESSER I and $684,331 from ESSER II. Only a portion of the funds have been released to the school from the second ESSER funding and the amounts from the third ESSER package has not been announced.

The priorities that were chosen to be the center of this plan included Social Emotional Learning (SEL), literacy and mathematics.

Director of Academic Services for the River Falls School District, Jennifer Peterson said, “We identified things such as having literacy support, having a literacy coach to help students with ensuring they can read early on and getting them extra time that they lost during this past year and more math intervention support and some ways we can do more academic tutoring to support students before and after school.”

The plan is to invest in these specific areas by implementing new job positions and programs that help with achievement gaps in these areas.

“What are ways that we can find and utilize funding through ESSER to increase family engagement at an increased level, what can we do to help our students in the recovery and re-entry stage, those were some of the questions and ideas that really came out of the task force,” said Peterson.

The task force has identified a wide variety of possibilities for what the money can be spent on; the summary of options for spending is available through the district website.

These funds can be used until September 2024, so the district is looking at what areas investing these funds will provide longevity without impacting future budgets. Peterson said, “We’re doing our best to incorporate things that will be sustainable after ESSER funds are no longer available to us.” The task force has recognized a wide variety of possibilities for what the money can be spent on.

However, with the current situation with the legislative decisions for funding for education and schools in the state, the district is holding back on what the funding is going to be used on.

Peterson said, “Right now we are really on a holding pattern because of everything that has been going on in Madison, with the legislative body and joint finance and basically our superintendent is saying we’re not spending money right now because I don’t know what money we’re going to have.”

The decisions being made by legislators will impact future budgets and the spending of ESSER funds for the River Falls district; Peterson explained that the decisions will have the largest impact on staffing within the schools and will result in not being able to implement the new positions outlined in the recovery plan to help with learning loss.

“I really hope that our legislative bodies will support education and schools moving forward so that our ESSER funds can truly be what they were intended to be, as funding to help us get back on our feet after months with struggling with student instruction. We had close to 400 students learning virtually last year so trying to personalize and provide instruction for those students as well as those in face-to-face classes does impact a district’s budget. We don’t want the burden to go back on the taxpayers in River Falls, we want those funds to come through the federal government which is exactly what this program was intended to do, so I’m hopeful that we will have more funds come our way,” Peterson said.