The Warren Township High School District 121 Board of Education discussed how it will spend federal and state COVID-relief funds at a meeting Tuesday.
The district received $1.1 million in relief funding which is being used during this current school year. It will have another $2.7 million which will be used in the next two school years, according to Assistant Superintendent of Instructional Services Christopher Geocaris.
“We wanted to make sure that we had a good program in place, and we wanted to utilize the (relief) funds for the following two years to continue to support the programming that we put into action this year,” he said.
The district must use 20% of the funding received to address student learning loss through evidence-based interventions. Geocaris discussed the programs that the district will implement to address student learning loss, including through the continuation of the district’s AIM program.
Additionally, District 121 will hire eight interventionist teachers and four social workers to take part in the AIM program for students intending to make up for lost learning. The district also plans to have a restorative justice center, which will have two supervisors to remediate students’ behavior in lieu of suspension. The center will have a focus on academics and social emotional learning.
The district is also planning on introducing Panorama, a questionnaire that assesses students’ social emotional well-being and learning. In addition, student management intervention software will be used to help identify students with social emotional learning deficiencies and provide a platform for student services to work with students to help with their deficiencies, according to Geocaris.
The total amount used to address learning loss allocation will be $2.2 million over two years, which is significantly more than the 20% requirement.
The district will also spend a portion of the funding on summer enrichment programs for students, which will cost $489,000 dispersed over three summers, and will be free for families in the district. The funds will cover the cost of summer schoolteachers, an additional summer school nurse, a summer school dean and transportation costs.
The final way that the district is using the COVID-relief funds is on after-school programming for the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years. The district will offer after-school credit recovery twice per week for one hour. This will be available at both campuses, according to Geocaris, and will run immediately after school. It will also offer a Huntington SAT Prep program, which will be free for students. The total cost for these programs will be $62,000 over two school years.
While the district is currently struggling financially and making plans to add a referendum question to the 2022 ballot to increase the district’s tax rate, board member John Anderson reaffirmed that the money the district is receiving for these programs is not funding that the district could use to help ease its financial situation.
“We’re not spending money that we have; we’re spending money that we’re getting from the government,” Anderson said. “This is one-time money that’s going to disappear. Once we get out in 2024, all of this money goes away. It’s not like we’re just adding programs, and we’ve been hiding money.”
