|
Dear Indiana Superintendents and Principals -
Over the last two years, your commitment to our students’ safety, academic success, and overall wellbeing has made an incredible impact. As you have navigated unique challenges, you have also worked to deploy unprecedented funds to support student safety and success. Along with these unprecedented funds has come the responsibility of transparently displaying how we are using these funds to best serve our students.
Together, we are working to provide increased transparency on how federal COVID-19 relief allocations are being deployed across the state. This transparency is key to continuing public trust in our schools and the services we provide to our communities.
To this end, earlier this year the Indiana Department of Education’s (IDOE’s) new Office of School Efficiency launched a dashboard that provides a view of current statewide and district-level allocations and reimbursements of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) and Governor's Emergency Education Relief (GEER) funds. We recently released an update to the dashboard that includes greater detail on both budgeted and reimbursed expenditures. If you haven’t seen the dashboard yet, you can review the current dashboard here.
We understand that each school corporation’s circumstances and uses for the federal relief funds are unique, so we want to ensure you have an opportunity to share your plans and data in your own words. To complement the quantitative data that is currently posted on relief spending, we would like to invite your district to include a link on the updated dashboard to additional information on your website detailing how you are deploying these funds.
This could include a link to your locally-developed plans, or could spotlight how you are prioritizing accelerating student learning, supporting our educators, making a sustainable impact on innovation across our schools, and updating technology and other infrastructure. We know that you’ve worked hard at the local level to invest in sustainable strategies and make investments that will reduce future expenses. By adding a direct link on the dashboard to an overview of your use of ESSER and GEER funds, together we will make it even easier for anyone to quickly see how your school is working to invest these funds to support our students.
We’ve developed a potential template you can use for presenting this data here (click File>Make a Copy to edit the template), but please feel free to customize this to fit your district’s needs or use information already posted on your district’s website. Once you have this page ready, please submit your link for us to include on the dashboard here. We ask that you provide this link to IDOE by Friday, July 29.
Thank you for your commitment to strategically and sustainably investing Indiana’s COIVD-19 relief funds. If you have any questions about this dashboard update or how to ensure your local data is included, please contact Courtney Schaafsma, IDOE director of school efficiency.
Thank you,
Tracy Brown
Chief Financial Officer
Indiana Department of Education
John Keller
Chief Information Officer
Indiana Department of Education
|
