Nate Casey, Pearl’s Chief Revenue Officer, has worked with various sub-recipients and vendors that have been awarded ARP ESSER funds. He shares his research and findings in a webinar to help demystify the process for tutoring companies interested in acquiring these funds.
What is ARP ESSER?
In March 2021, the U.S. Department of Education approved the American Rescue Plan Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ARP ESSER) fund of $122 billion dollars to help U.S. educators resume educational operations and student learning impacted by COVID-19 in a sustainable way.
COVID-19 caused serious learning loss for students. Over 55 million children were left without access to in-person classroom instruction, counseling, school lunch, and many other services. These funds seek to address that crisis. Tutoring is a clear, data-based method of addressing learning loss among students.
How does tutoring address learning loss?
Our friends at Brown University’s Annenberg institute have shown through rigorous research that high-dosage tutoring can produce large learning gains for a wide range of students, including those who have fallen behind academically.
Here is a quote from that paper:
“In the field of K-12 research, where there is little agreement on what works, findings about tutoring helping with learning loss are remarkable not only for their magnitude but also for their consistency. The evidence is clear that tutoring can make a significant impact on students’ educational achievements if they have fallen behind.”
Who is ready for ARP ESSER funds?
ARP ESSER is allocating between $120 and $190 billion dollars to states and school districts. 20% of the funding that goes to the districts is earmarked specifically to close educational gaps resulting from COVID-19.
Wondering if your organization is ready? Do you meet the following criteria:
- Do you have over 25 tutors on your roster?
- Are you leveraging trusted evidence-based processes for training tutors, maintaining quality, and reporting?
- Do you have experience with government funding?
If not, don’t worry. There is still time to get ready and Pearl can help!
How does my organization access ARP ESSER funds or grants?
Funds flow from the federal government to state education agencies. From there, funds are allocated to Local Educational Agencies (LEAs) like school districts. The LEA then uses those funds to hire a vendor or sub-recipient.
Most likely, your organization would be pursuing funds as a vendor of the LEA. This means responding to requests for bids from those school districts.
The main difference between a sub-recipient and a Vendor is that a sub-recipient has the autonomy to decide which students receive support. For further clarification, sub-recipients respond to Grants and Vendors respond to bid requests.
How is Pearl involved with ARP ESSER?
As a tutoring platform built to handle the administrative and back-end tasks for companies, we are serving as a technical partner for our customers as they launch, manage, and scale hybrid tutoring programs.