Staffing investments appear throughout ESSER III plans both in clearly identified spending plan line items, as well as bundled into programs such as after school and summer school. While difficult to put an exact figure on it given the variety of ways programs are presented, staffing makes up tens of billions of dollars of ESSER III planned spending with the bulk of that spent against instruction.
As described in last week's Substack, Burbio is building keyword analysis capabilities into all the documents we gather. The following is a series of charts featuring keywords used to describe staffing plans, with the focus on terms used related to teaching. For each chart below, the figures summarize the number of ESSER III plans that mention the given term at least once. Stated another way, if a term is mentioned multiple times in a plan, it only counts as "one" in the charts below.
Burbio's searchable ESSER III database now consists of 6,500 ESSER III plans. As previously noted, ESSER III plans vary in the level of description they provide, so we view these results as highly directional rather than specific.
Our first chart is a selection of widely terms related to staff training:
Below are examples of terms related to staff positions:
The following terms are related to staff compensation:
The following chart is a broad selection of terms that individually appeared in just under 10% of ESSER III plans, but collectively offer additional insight into language districts are using in this category: