Afton Partners

Raising Blended Learners (“RBL”) is a statewide initiative demonstrating the ability to use blended learning strategies to improve student achievement across diverse student demographics and geographic regions in Texas. Four school districts and one charter network received up to $500,000 in grant funding and comprehensive implementation supports after a competitive consideration process; these organizations, called demonstration sites, will serve as proof points for the effective implementation of blended learning. Fifteen additional districts/networks were selected as pilot sites and are receiving comprehensive implementation supports but no incremental funding; these sites will further promote the expansion of blended learning statewide and contribute toward learning. 

Afton focused on supporting and promoting the financial (and operational) sustainability of the RBL  initiative, through a combination of direct technical assistance and cohort level evaluation, assessments and data analysis. While we tailored our technical supports to suit individual sites’ needs, and while our areas of focus for the RBL initiative evolved over time, our work can be broken down into the following periods, with the key activities within each period as follows:

• Pre-grant award support and “Pulse Checks”
  • Financial workshops
  • “Pulse Check” exercise
  • Grant material development and review
  • Evaluation support
• Year one implementation support and sustainability planning
  • Individualized scopes of work for financial technical assistance
  • Site visits and rural cohort meeting(s)
  • Financial model development
• Year two planning and sustainability evaluations
  • Cash planning iteration and variance reporting
  • Evaluation material development (data collection templates and sustainability rubric)
  • Data collection and CFO interviews
  • Sustainability rubric evaluation
  • Year one report: conclusions and lessons learned

A thorough, detailed analysis of sources and uses of funds for the first year of the Raising Blended Learners grant program revealed:

• Excluding the technical support professional development (which were philanthropically funded and resulted in no direct expenditures at the site-level), sites plan to spend $209 per pupil on average, per year, over a five year time period to support their blended learning models.
• While incremental funding will be used at some sites, most networks are planning to fund this initiative by reallocating existing expenditures to support blended learning in the long-term.  
• Sites are incurring one-time costs to support their blended learning programs, but they plan to primarily invest in key design elements with recurring costs.
• Half of planned expenditures are investments in personnel and professional development, rather than software, hardware or other IT expenses.