Grants for Opening Doors, Expanding Opportunities

Program Description

This program supports Local Educational Agencies (LEAs) and their communities in preparing to implement innovative, effective, ambitious, comprehensive, and locally driven strategies to increase socioeconomic diversity in schools and LEAs as a means to improve the achievement of students in the lowest-performing schools. Through the Opening Doors, Expanding Opportunities program, the Department will support LEAs in two different stages of increasing socioeconomic diversity in their schools. First, this program supports an LEA, or a consortium of LEAs, to: (1) analyze existing challenges and devise potential solutions for increasing socioeconomic diversity in their schools; and (2) create a blueprint for improving academic outcomes for students in their lowest-performing schools by substantially increasing socioeconomic diversity, as referenced above, in their lowest-performing schools by the end of the 2025-2026 school year and a strategy for implementing that blueprint. Second, this program supports an LEA, or a consortium of LEAs, that have existing or established efforts to improve student outcomes by increasing socioeconomic diversity, to: (1) analyze existing challenges and devise potential solutions for further increasing socioeconomic diversity in their schools; (2) publish a blueprint for building on these existing efforts to improve academic outcomes for students in their lowest-performing schools by substantially increasing and maintaining socioeconomic diversity in their lowest-performing schools by the end of the 2025-2026 school year; and (3) execute one or more Pre-Implementation Activities that will contribute to the possible full implementation of the blueprint after the grant period.

The resulting blueprints will: (1) provide a publicly available implementation plan for the grantee LEAs and their communities to support efforts to increase the socioeconomic diversity in their schools; (2) serve as a resource for local and State policy decisions that could reduce barriers to, and build support for, increasing socioeconomic diversity in schools; and (3) serve as a resource for other communities considering similar approaches.