Strategy Development & Implementation Support for State Education Agencies (SEAs)
As district leaders across the country navigate a shifting, post-ESSER financial landscape, state education agencies (SEAs) have a critical role to play in supporting their sustainability, strategy, and planning efforts. We equip SEAs with the tools and skills they need to effectively support districts in meeting student and educator needs in financially sustainable ways.
Our Approach to Supporting SEAs
Create Cohorts and Networks
We support SEA leaders in designing and implementing statewide systems of support by facilitating multidistrict networks that enable leaders to target supports to districts with shared experiences.
The Goal: Create opportunities for the districts you serve to collaborate and learn together.
Monitor Progress
We partner with SEA staff to design effective progress monitoring and continuous improvement efforts to assess the success of statewide initiatives.
The Goal: Track your strategies to ensure they’re working as intended and moving your districts forward.
Provide Tools and Trainings
We create and deliver customized tools, guidance, and trainings around topics related to strategic resource use, including school staffing and scheduling tools for local agencies and capacity building to aid SEAs’ district resource allocation reviews.
The Goal: Create tailored resources for the districts you serve, aligned to your priorities and preferences.
How We Partner With SEAs
Many SEAs find it challenging to execute strategic—rather than compliance-focused—approaches, so we help them shift resources across departments to provide holistic support, use data effectively, and aid district leaders in repurposing funding.
“ERS has supported our Tennessee Rural Principals Network for two years now, bringing engaging and actionable professional learning to 120 rural school leaders on topics including how to make strategic budget trade-offs and innovative ways to organize the school day for more instruction and teacher planning time.
An impressive 96% of participants said the sessions improved their ability to strategically utilize their resources. Especially in today’s financial climate, that’s a critical skill for any school leader.”
—Dominique Davis, Director, District Support Centers of Regional Excellence (CORE), Tennessee Department of Education
Reworking South Carolina’s Statewide Education Strategy
The Opportunity
In 2023, we worked with the South Carolina Department of Education’s Office of School Transformation (OST) to develop a Resource Allocation Review (RAR) process, an SEA requirement from the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act.
The Strategic Process
Grounded in the Alliance for Resource Equity’s dimensions of equity and do-it-yourself resource equity diagnostic toolkit, ERS helped the SEA conduct these RARs by:
- Leading a three-part training series on resource equity for the OST team, building both their understanding of resource equity and their capacity to lead RAR discussions with their districts.
- Developing school funding analysis workbooks for each of their participating districts that auto-populate metrics across high-priority resource equity dimensions.
- Designing a customized RAR protocol for SEA staff to guide their conversations with district leaders about current resource allocation trends and barriers and opportunities to create more equitable resource use.
The Results
Our collaboration refined OST’s process to help them train staff to lead district-level conversations, make data-driven improvements, and ensure every student in the state had equitable access to a high-quality education.
“Our partnership with ERS was integral in designing the resource allocation review (RAR) process for our state. The collaborative meetings and tools that they provided truly supported us in … designing an impactful RAR process [for our participating districts].”
—Kimberly Mack, Director, Office of School Transformation, South Carolina Department of Education
Other State Partners
Let’s Work Together
If you’re interested to learn more about how ERS supports state leaders and state education agencies, please reach out using the form below. We look forward to hearing from you!