State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond today announced the availability of $4 billion in funding to county offices of education, school districts, and charter schools for learning recovery initiatives.

Under Thurmond’s leadership, California worked proactively to provide additional resources to help our students beyond 2024, when the federal relief funding expires. These efforts included the $7.9 billion Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grant available to schools in this year’s state budget. These one-time funds are to be used through 2027–28 on strategies to support academic learning recovery, including intensive tutoring, additional instructional time, accelerated learning strategies, early literacy intervention, other learning supports, and staff and student social and emotional well-being following two-and-a-half challenging years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The first of two equal apportionments began to go out yesterday to county offices of education, and local educational agencies (LEAs) should start receiving funds shortly thereafter to help with learning recovery through the 2027–28 school year. The second installment is planned for spring 2023. Total allocation amounts for each LEA are available on CDE’s Funding Results web page. County superintendents were notified this week of the first apportionment via this letter from CDE.

“We pushed hard for these historic state investments, knowing that California students—along with everyone in the nation—have been through a very difficult time and faced many challenges,” said Superintendent Thurmond. “Now that the state has provided these unprecedented resources, we want to turn dollars into impact, work with our schools so they learn about best practices for learning acceleration and recovery, and highlight research and proven strategies for improving the lives of all students.”

Additional state resources for districts to support learning recovery efforts include an extra $3 billion for expanded learning, for an ongoing total of $4 billion, to lower staff-to-pupil ratios and increase time during the school year, summer school, and intersessional programs, as well as $250 million to develop literacy programs and hire and train reading and literacy coaches and specialists.

Last month, Thurmond launched the first in a series of virtual webinars to update LEAs, including district and charter school administrators and classroom educators, on learning acceleration and the ways schools are using billions of dollars in state funding to successfully address learning loss from the pandemic. Thurmond and the CDE will host the next in this series of webinars on November 10, and an invitation will be sent to LEAs with more information later this week.

The CDE has also created an online resource for LEAs to support their efforts to promote learning recovery. This new CDE Learning Acceleration and Recovery Resources web page centralizes information for several programs that can be used to support learning recovery efforts. This includes several highlights of what LEAs have done with multiple funding sources to accelerate learning.

For more information, LEA staff may contact the CDE School Improvement and Support Office at LREBG@cde.ca.gov. Read more about the grant on the CDE Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grant web page.