photo by: Lawrence Journal-World

Lawrence school district offices, pictured in April 2021.

The Lawrence school district now has a plan to spend its newest chunk of federal pandemic aid.

The school board on Monday approved a spending plan for $13.5 million of relief funding, which now must be approved by the Kansas State Board of Education. The funding comes from the third round of the state’s allotment of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, also known as ESSER.

Some of that funding includes bonuses to teachers as part of a retention package previously approved by the school board.

With the additional $13.5 million, the district’s total amount of federal pandemic relief is up to about $21 million, Kathy Johnson, the district’s executive director of finance, said in an email. The district previously received $1.4 million in 2020 and about $6 million over the summer.

Similar to previous pandemic relief funding, the $13.5 million can be spent only on specific pandemic-related issues. According to a memo provided to the board members, the district plans to spend about $6 million of the funding this school year, $7 million next school year and about $480,000 during the 2023-24 school year. All of the funds are required to be spent by Sept. 30, 2024.

Spending in the approved plan includes about $4.1 million on improving air quality in district buildings, $1.3 million to pay for academic intervention and about $500,000 to house a full-time certified substitute teacher in each school building for the current school year, among other things.

But the largest chunk of the funding is set aside for the district’s teacher retention bonus program, with about $4.5 million coming from this round of funding.

The school board in September approved a plan that offered teachers and other school employees $1,500 in bonuses over the current school year, then again in the 2022-2023 school year, if they remain employed by the district. About 1,700 employees could be eligible for the bonus, which could cost the district about $5.3 million of its total pandemic relief funding.

Those bonuses have not yet been disbursed. Superintendent Anthony Lewis said at a previous school board meeting that the timeline for the first round of bonuses was recently changed because the district was still waiting for approval from the state, which needs to sign off on the district’s relief funding plan.

On Monday, Lewis said the district’s plan for the previous allotment of funds — about $6 million in a round of relief funding known as ESSER II — is scheduled to be considered by the state board of education on Tuesday. He said if that plan is approved by the state board, the first round of the retention bonuses will be provided to educators.

According to the ESSER II application in the state board of education’s agenda, a little more than $800,000 of the funding for the retention bonus plans is in that allotment.

“As soon as they approved it, our folks in HR are … prepared to distribute that first incentive payment to eligible staff,” Lewis said of the retention funds in the ESSER II plan.