Dr. Robert Avossa: Well thank you for having me here. I always joke with people and say I’m a recovering superintendent. I spent eight years a superintendent, five in Fulton County Georgia which is Atlanta, and three years down here in South Florida where I still in Palm Beach. It’s been interesting to watch this COVID response from the federal government. I just wanted to ground ourselves in a couple of things to remind ourselves how these dollars have been allocated. The CARES Act original investment that came from the Trump administration was really designed to allow school systems to buy protective gear, to begin looking at the kinds of things that they needed. They provided some level of structure in terms of what you could buy and when. And you can see down here that those dollars need to be spent by June 2021 which is right around the corner. 

And if any of you who are on and have their CFOs you need to be talking to your chief financial officers making sure they spend that down first. Federal money always first, state money second, local money third. The second investment came from Biden administration. The $54 billion investment, most of which was used by districts to purchase materials, computers, hotspots etcetera. But the one that I think people are most interested in about is the third investment which is the ARP Act. Now earlier Dr. Carpenter had talked about supplant versus supplement. There were some state departments that were talking about reducing state investments and allowing districts to use the federal money. Well notice has just come in from the U.S. Department of Education saying they can’t do that. 

So if you’ve got state legislatures and folks communicating about reducing budgets and allowing you to use federal dollars you need to blow the whistle on that. That’s not allowed and that’s been clearly articulated. There were some of my friends who live in Connecticut who were mortified to find out they were going to make cuts and then in the end found out that that won’t happen. So that $122 billion or so needs to be spent by 2024, but you’ve got a lot of work to do before you can start spending it, including the development and depending on your state of different programs and packages you’ve got to put together for your State Department. So pay attention to that. 

You are also mandated to get community input and buy-in. And you remember if you don’t lead in this space folks will fill that void and try to spend that money for the district and in not a coherent way to address the needs of your children or students. So 20% now 80% by 2024, let’s be smart about how we’re create system to do that.

Dr. Carpenter: Absolutely. Yeah go ahead.

Dr. Robert Avossa: Just real quickly I just want to run through a couple of other things. Investing in resources to implement K12 operational strategies, you know, you guys can read this, a lot of conversation and call-out socio-emotional learning and mental health and funding of hotspots. This is the first time in my 25 year career that I’ve seen this much flexibility in federal spending. But I would tell my friends “Don’t be on the bleeding edge, make sure that, you know, there’s always safety in numbers” meaning getting, you know, your state and others to support how you want to spend your dollars and not get overly creative. And then 20/80 rule, you know, the learning loss with 20% of the allocation needs to address immediate needs. 

And I think the other group who split off to talk a little bit about that as you know are, people are talking about summer programming, extended day, trying to find ways to accelerate and think about it more in a positive term rather than remediation. And then, you know the real question here is what’s your game plan for the 80%, have you begun to prioritize that? And I’ll share something with you that’s free; if any of you want a toolkit Chiefs for Change just released publicly even to non-members a toolkit that will allow you to think about how to use yours. So go to the Chiefs for Change website, it’s a free document that you can download.

Note: The following text is transcribed from the event audio. It’s largely accurate, but in some cases it may be a bit off due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It’s intended as an aid to understanding the event, but it shouldn’t be treated as an authoritative record.