Optimizing Your EdTech Resources in a Post-ESSER World with Lightspeed Digital Insight

K-12 schools have relied on distributions from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund to pay for staffing, programming, and much-needed technologies. With the final round of ESSER funds expiring at the end of the month, districts are bracing themselves for significant financial challenges.

89% of superintendents expect a significant decline in spending due to ESSER expiration, with most reporting a moderate decline, according to Tyton Partners

As budgets decline, district leaders will face heightened pressure to optimize spending, and maximize edtech return on investment (ROI), forcing them to conduct a thorough audit of their current edtech landscape, reassess priorities, and potentially adjust to staff reductions. To accomplish this, IT departments need complete visibility into district edtech usage and simplified, streamlined processes that enable them to save more, spend less, and make decisions with confidence.

How Lightspeed Digital Insight Can Help Districts Optimize EdTech Resources

As ESSER funding dries up, districts will need to optimize their spending, as well as staff resources, and make tough decisions about which technologies to sustain. With Lightspeed Digital Insight, districts can reduce edtech costs and administrative overhead with app usage insights and streamlined edtech management.

Leveraging this platform, IT leaders can:

1. Evaluate app usage to optimize ROI

With ESSER funding no longer available, districts will need to take a sharp look at what apps they are currently using, prioritizing those with the biggest learning impact and eliminating redundant apps. To do this, IT leaders need detailed app usage analytics to make informed decisions about their edtech investments.

According to our 2024 EdTech App Report, while the average school district uses a median of over 2,000 applications, only 97 applications make up 95% of student app engagement.

Lightspeed Digital Insight provides real-time usage data on all apps across the district, all in one place. IT leaders can view comprehensive usage data across schools, grades, and other subgroups, and devices, identify redundant apps and/or under-utilized apps, and compare app statistics across campuses, grade levels, categories, and more. With this full transparency into edtech usage, IT leaders can make data-based decisions to maximize their budgets.

2. Improve license management

License management is critical to ensure a district gets value from its edtech investments. Lightspeed Digital Insight enables IT leaders to easily track purchased apps, cost per contract and individual license, license term dates, and, as mentioned above, usage data to save time and inform purchasing decisions. As IT leaders begin re-evaluating their tech spending and prioritizing budget allocations, this centralized data enables collaboration and simplifies license renewal decisions.

3. Monitor device usage and health to optimize tech investments

Measuring the impact of district-provided devices is also important to IT cost optimization. Understanding device usage can help districts streamline internet and device troubleshooting, manage loss prevention, and maximize the impact of digital learning. With Lightspeed Digital Equity, IT leaders gain visibility into students’ internet access and device health outside of school with robust, real-time data districts can’t find anywhere else.

4. Save time with streamlined student data privacy and edtech management

As threats to student data privacy and school system data breaches continue to increase, districts must remain vigilant about protecting data privacy. However, mitigating student data privacy risks is a significantly time-consuming and costly task for school districts—one that will only be exacerbated with the loss of ESSER funding.

Lightspeed Digital Insight equips IT leaders with tools that make data privacy management simpler, more efficient, and less time-consuming. Leaders can leverage an easy-to-read dashboard highlighting potential student data privacy concerns, a consolidated view of third-party data privacy policies with filtering and badge features to expedite app reviews, and real-time privacy policy scanning to notify IT administrators of policy changes.

Given the vast number of edtech apps in use, managing edtech review and approval processes has also become a significantly cumbersome task for IT staff. With Lightspeed Digital Insight, IT administrators can easily view, manage, and approve apps in one place, simplifying the edtech review and approval process. For districts that may be challenged by staffing shortages, these time-saving features enable IT departments to work more efficiently, freeing up valuable time for more pressing issues.

5. Share critical financial reports with all stakeholders

With the expiration of ESSER funds, districts will be hyper-focused on maximizing budgets and ensuring return on tech investments. Leveraging Lightspeed Digital Insight, IT leaders can track and provide accurate federal spending reports for critical Title 1 and ESSER funding and track, compile, and quickly share reports on budget and spending to facilitate collaborations across departments. App engagement insights reveal whether purchased resources are actively being used and help determine ROI.

Summary

Lightspeed Digital Insight empowers IT leaders with crucial insights ensuring every dollar is used efficiently and effectively. Additionally, Lightspeed Digital Insight eases administrative strain by streamlining manual processes and saving time that can be devoted to other priorities.

“Lightspeed Digital Insight has helped us prioritize certain applications over others by giving us transparency into how often those tools are used,” said Justin Steele, former IT Director at Caddo Parish School District in Shreveport, LA. “We will be re-negotiating [one of our contracts] at renewal and will save 58% in spending for that platform, and an overall 16% in budget spending for the year,” shared Steele.

With the expiration of ESSER funding, managing your edtech stack is more important than ever. Lightspeed Digital Insight can help you cut costs and maximize your edtech ROI.