During discussions of high school reconfiguration, the issue of class sizes has been brought up regularly.

On Monday, the issue reared its head during a school board committee meeting for another reason.

As the Warren County School District Board of Education’s Finance Committee took a look at some projections, they were told, not for the first time, that the federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) dollars that have brought millions of COVID relief dollars to the district over the past three years, will dry up at the end of the 2023-2024 school year.

ESSER dollars were first approved in March 2020 to help fight the negative educational impacts of COVID-19.

Those dollars entered the district’s budget in 2021, when Superintendent Amy Stewart suggested to the board that five elementary class-size-reduction teachers be hired with them. The district has continued to put those dollars to use to reduce class sizes, according to Stewart.

“This is to the tune of about $21 million we’ve been spreading out over three years,” she said.

The school board does not typically spend one-time dollars on personnel, according to Board Member Donna Zariczny. But, the members decided more teachers and smaller classes were the ways to fight back against the pandemic’s learning loss.

“Nationally, we did such a disservice to have them closed out of schools,” Finance Committee Chair Arthur Stewart said.

It was the right thing, he said, to do to “pledge every red cent back into classrooms with the children. To realize there are several dozen ESSER positions is impressive and frightening.”

Administrators were aware that the dollars would dry up and are planning for the day when those dollars are gone and those positions go with them. “We saw the nightmare when it came through the door,” Amy Stewart said. “Every director knows that FTEs (full-time equivalencies) have to come out.”

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“That puts more pressure on our classroom teachers because our class sizes will be higher,” she said.

There were other options for the dollars – “we can clean, provide more virtual services.”

The options have to address COVID issues. Textbooks were a tempting target, but the strings attached to the dollars meant the district would have to go through a bid process.

“We want to make that decision,” Stewart said. “We want the best textbook. My elementary teachers are passionate about teaching reading to children. We don’t want the lowest-bid reading textbook.”

There are more than 40 positions – teachers, custodians, paraprofessionals, and others – on the ESSER payroll.

When ESSER is gone, the district will have to make do without those positions or “come up with a comparable cut” to keep some, Stewart said.

There are internal limits on class sizes at the elementary level. According to district policy, for kindergarten through second grades, “students will be assigned a teacher” when there are 11 to 27 students in a classroom. For third through fifth grades the range is 11 to 30 students. There are also steps outlined when a class has more than 27 or 30 respectively.

The ESSER dollars have helped the district stay away from the very top of those ranges at its more populous buildings. The end of ESSER is adding complications for the district.

“Here we are in the middle of our master facilities plan planning and this is around the corner,” Arthur Stewart said. “It is highly relevant. It may be too darned complicated to bring in.”