2026 State Personnel Development Grants Program (SPDG) Grant Competition Applicant Orientation

Hello, this is Jennifer Coffey at the U.S. Department of Education. I will be taking you through information about the State Personnel Development Grants Competition, and the listing number is 84.323A. And this is an applicant orientation. So if you are considering applying for this grant, you are in the right place. Also, feel free to share this informational webinar with others who may be planning to partner with you on the grant or will help you write it. A few notes regarding this webinar. These slides are for guidance only, and I'm summarizing the information from the application notice and instructions. So please do read the entirety. It is shorter than it has been in previous years and in a new format that I think is easier to follow. But this webinar would be a bit too long if I covered everything and wouldn't necessarily be helpful to you. So I'm focusing on a few things. But the ANI or ANI, not quite sure what to call it yet, that will have more information. So read the entirety of that. And all of the references are related statutes, regulations, instructions. And then there is a 2022 recorded webinar titled Applying for Office of Special Education Programs Discussionary Grants. That is some basic ideas about applying for a grant from our office. And it is available on YouTube. If you search with that title, you should be able to find it. If you have any trouble, you can always email me at jennifer.coffee at ed.gov. This webinar will also be available on YouTube, specifically the department's YouTube site. And we will have the links to what the slide deck itself will be on grants.gov. But the video and the slide deck will be available on ed.gov on the State Personnel Development Grant landing page. Couple of important timelines. One, this application became available or ANI became available on April 15th. And your application will be due no later than eleven fifty nine p.m. Eastern Time on June 16th. Again, application is an instructions and I is on grants.gov. The ANI is the official documentation of program requirements, and it contains the absolute priority, the programmatic requirements and the selection criteria. Today, I will cover this big program information, its purpose and who is eligible for this grant program. I will also cover some important information about this specific competition. Our one absolute priority this year, which is required the statutory requirements, which as titled, are required. The Government Performance Results Act, also known as GPRA. We call them program measures that you will be writing about in your application. The selection criteria that the peer reviewers use to provide your scores and then additional requirements I'm highlighting for you. The grants.gov system submission procedures and tips for applicants will be the final topics we'll cover. So for the program information, we'll talk about the purpose, the eligible applicants, the funding levels and the cost information. Purpose of the program authorized by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, IDEA, is to assist state educational agencies, SEAs, in reforming and improving their systems for personnel preparation and professional development and early intervention, educational and transition services in order to improve results for children with disabilities. The purpose of this specific competition is to award grants on a competitive basis to SEAs to carry out the activities described in the state plan submitted under Section 653 or 653 of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Again, IDEA. So what are SEAs? How do we define them here? They are the 50 states, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, United States Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The total funding available is $7,301,695. We estimate that we could make seven awards and the project period is five years. If you, as an applicant, are one of the 50 states, the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, you must ask for at least $500,000 for each of those five years. So that is the base. You cannot receive less than that each year. And if the application has a number for a year that's less than that, that does cause problems. The outlying areas, their awards will be not less than $80,000. Please do note that if you're receiving SPDIG money, new SPDIG money in fiscal year 2026, you are not able to apply for this grant. That is in IDEA, the statute where our grant competition comes from. Our grant program comes from. You can only receive SPDIG funds for a year for one grant. You cannot have more than one grant. And of course, it must go to the SEA, the State Educational Agency. So planning your budget. You don't have to worry about cost sharing for this. The indirect cost rate is unrestricted. So if you have a set indirect cost rate, you use that. If not, you follow the rules laid out. The grantee is required to use at least 90% of funds each year for the professional development activities described in paragraph A and not more than 10% of the funds the SEA receives under the grant for any fiscal year for the other activities described in paragraph B. I'll get into that a little bit more a few slides in. Subgrants are allowable and you must award contracts or subgrants to at least one local education agency, at least one Institute of Higher Education and at least one Parent Training and Information Center or Community Parent Resource Center. So not every state has an OSEP funded Community Parent Resource Center, also known as CPRCs. Every state does have a PTI, a Parent Training and Information Center. So if you have both kinds of OSEP centers, OSEP parent centers in your state, you could choose one. You could support both. You know, they could support you and you could support them working collaboratively through the grant. You could also work with another family organization. This is just that baseline of of what you're required to do. You also may award contracts and subgrants to other public and private entities, including the lead agency under Part C of IDEA to carry out the state plan. So you'll notice there is quite a bit of information about Part C. And we do encourage that in the state development plan does encourage you to look at what is happening. What are the personnel needs in that area? Is this grant something that could be supporting Part C? It is not a requirement to do that. And again, the grant must go to the SEA. And so you would be working with Part C as a subaward, as either a contract or a subgrant. Competition information. This will include the absolute priority and the statutory requirements, the Government Performance Results Act, the application narrative and selection criteria and the application requirements and general requirements. We have one absolute priority this year. It is required and it is titled Career Pathways and Workforce Readiness. So this is about registered apprenticeships and registered apprenticeships to prepare special educators, including those serving infants, toddlers, children or youth with disabilities. It could be a registered apprenticeship of somebody serving children with disabilities specifically that is not in special education. The focus is special education. If you happen to have a speech and language pathologist or adaptive PE, it's, you know, there are different areas. Might be a good idea to connect with me, go and email me and we can talk about what that looks like within these requirements and the absolute priority. But I think that's why there's a little more space there. But it is about serving infants, toddlers, children and youth with disabilities. And so then you can do one or more of the following of this next list. You can support the development and expansion of registered apprenticeship programs designed to lead to educator certification. You can create targeted pathways for instructional assistants, paraprofessionals, substitute teachers, career changers and other individuals already working in educational settings to earn teaching credentials and to become certified educators while employed. You can align secondary and post-secondary educator registered apprenticeship programs with state educator licensure requirements and workforce shortage areas. Let's do that one again. You can align secondary and post-secondary educator registered apprenticeship programs with state educator licensure requirements and workforce shortage areas. That is a mouthful. You can provide technical assistance to school districts, educator preparation providers, as well as EPPs, institutions of higher education. Again, the IHE and registered apprenticeship intermediaries to establish or expand registered educator apprenticeship programs. So, for example, if you have a general educator, general educator registered educator apprenticeship program, you could expand that to be for special educators as well by providing this TA. You could also choose to promote earn and learn models through registered apprenticeships that reduce financial barriers and increase access to the teaching profession, particularly in high needs areas, including provision of paid work experience in a full time position, a progression of wage increases and coursework that leads to certification delivered to accommodate full time work schedules. So this is a required priority. You must meet this. But the way that you do it, you have a menu here to choose from. You have to choose at least one, but you could choose more than one. So, again, I'm very available to talk about questions you might have. Feel free to email me anytime and we can set up a meeting to discuss. So there are great resources. Luckily, the Cedar Center has built up a whole website about registered teacher apprenticeship programs. So this link here would take you directly there. But if you search Cedar Center registered teacher apprenticeship programs or RTAPs in your state, then you will be able to find it. Lynn Hold Heidi of the Cedar team was also kind enough to offer that any state could reach out to her at Cedar. And if she can't answer your question, she will connect you with the team member who can as well as meeting or in addition to meeting the absolute priority. You also must meet the statutory requirements that are set out in IDEA and that we've been following with this bidig since 2004. So the following statutory requirements must be met. That's the state personnel development plan and the use of funds. An SCA that receives a grant under this program must use not less than 90% of the funds the SCA receives under the grant for any fiscal year for the professional development activities described in paragraph A and not more than 10% of the funds the SCA receives under the grant for any fiscal year for the other activities described in paragraph B. So you still have to choose at least one activity in each of those sections. Your it is likely that your teacher apprenticeship program would be related to one of the professional development activities. But, you know, I don't know exactly what you'll choose to do. Again, that's something I could help talk through with you if you would like. But you can look through that menu. And that use of funds section starts on page nine of the ANI. The application notice and instructions. And so look through that menu. Look through the other activities menu and be thinking about where your apprenticeship work will fit under those two areas. And then that will help you understand how much funding you can give to that. If you feel like it doesn't fit well into either of those, then again, I think it's a better conversation. But at least 90 percent of your spending has to fit into professional development. Up to 10 percent other activities. If you can't see it fitting there, then then let's have that conversation and try to figure that out. Required contracts or subgrants. So I mentioned this before. Just wanted to reiterate every year of the grant, including a no cost extension year, if you were provided that after your fifth year, every year of the grant, you must have a contract or subgrant with at least one LEA, one IHE and one either parent training and information center or community parent resource center. So PTIC, PROC's. And that's to help you carry out your work when you are creating your application. Please do reach out to these partners and talk about their strengths and how they can help you reach your objectives and how you measure success in your work together. Have those conversations included in your evaluation plan. That measurement of success. Have them help you write your application so that it is a true partnership, a true collaboration. This is just a best practice and application writing. You may award contracts and subgrants to other public and private entities, including the lead agency under Part C of IDEA to carry out the state plan. So do look at the state plan section to understand all the different areas of your state system, both early intervention and K through 12 and the transition to post-secondary and careers. Look at those systems of how from birth all the way to post through post-secondary, how children with disabilities are being served in your state and what that means for your work, how it's going to align or integrate or leverage. And you'll be explaining that in your application. Likely in the significance section is where that would fit. It's it's required that you explain these things. You don't need to do all of that work. You're going to figure out where you fit and explain that. So that the peer reviewer can understand exactly what the significance is of your project, what it means for the state. How will the state look different as a result? And part of that is going to be where it fits with the other state initiatives, both federal and other. Here are those GEPRA measures, Government Performance Results Act. We were talking about we call them program measures, because when you collect that information, we aggregate them into GEPRA measures and then report them to Congress. So at your level, you will be talking in your application about the data collection and reporting methods you would use and why these methods are likely to yield reliable, valid and meaningful performance data. Your capacity to collect and report reliable, valid and meaningful performance data as evidenced by high quality data collection, analysis and reporting and other projects or research. So that's that's the requirement related to GEPRA or your program measures. These are the specific program measures for the SVDIG. There is a link here to the SIG Network resources. If you go to SIGnetwork.org and on the top of the page, there's a toolbar on toward the right. It's going to have EPR resources. You can look at that APR and program measure resources, and you'll see more information about each of these measures, including the methodology. But one important resource is the evidence based professional development rubric that I list here. That is something that every grant collects every year, and it's about their professional development system or their professional learning system. And it talks about your selection processes, how you select professional development participants, how you train, how you coach, how you collect data, how administrators are involved and how you change systems as a result of what you're learning. So that's in a nutshell. But you'll be thinking about that professional development system as you write your application. And then each of the grants are required to collect implementation fidelity data. So this is the improvement in implementation over time. And so what the projects do is they collect what I think is better termed intervention fidelity. So these are whatever program intervention, whatever you are implementing with your project. You want to measure the fidelity of what is reaching the child with disabilities. So say that's a math program. So whatever is happening for that child with the math program, you're measuring the fidelity that is done with. And that would be used for program measure to measure three is a cost measure. And cost measures are required for every grant, every discretionary grant in the government. And so this is about how you use your money to sustain supportive practices. So specifically, you're going to do training, but we expect there to be coaching or mentoring this ongoing support after the training and how much money is being spent overall on your professional development and how much money is being used for that coaching, mentoring, ongoing support. Measure four is the outcome measure. And this is the percentage of projects that improve outcomes for children with disabilities. So in that example of math, the math intervention, you would have a math measure for children and you would decide what your targets are going to be and then you'd measure against this. It's a long term measure. So it's your final report or after five years that will be used for GEPRA. These are the criteria that the peer reviewers will use to score your narrative. The selection criteria are categorized in significance, project design, adequacy of resources, quality of the management plan and quality of the project evaluation or other evidence building, in this case, project evaluation. So significance, you can receive 20 points up to 20 points. And I wanted to just highlight a few important things here. I think that these are wordy, wordy sub criteria. And so I like to bring out a few big ideas. This first one, you want to present data that demonstrate what the issue or the challenge or the opportunity to be addressed is by the proposed project. And then also the magnitude of the need for the service services. How big is the magnitude? And how will you demonstrate that your training, your overall professional development is of sufficient quality, intensity and duration to build recipient project capacity? So how are you going to know you're going deep and lasting? And how will you show that there are improvements in practice and then that your project will lead to systemic change that supports continuous, sustainable and measurable improvement? For the quality of project design, you can earn up to 25 points. And the goals, objectives and outcomes should be specified, measurable and ambitious, yet achievable within the project period. You should have a high quality logic model. In this case, it is the logic model you're required to have a logic model. So we use Edgar criteria and that's why it says and or other conceptual framework. But it is logic model. And then how will you how are you proposing to demonstrate meaningful community engagement and input? You want to make sure that project is appropriate to successfully address the needs of the target population. And then the most recent and relevant knowledge and practices. And this is something that reviewers do look for. So if there's nothing recent and nothing has been done recent to provide evidence, then describe why you are using data that is a bit older. And then coordination with other federal investments. I talked about this a bit before this is this covers that idea in the state development plan that you are looking across all the different efforts that affect children with disabilities. And you're thinking about your place in it. What's happening in your state, giving the context and then what you're doing within that. So adequacy of resources. These are I didn't go to I didn't highlight too much because they're kind of basic and easy to understand. The third one I wanted to point out that your purposes, activities or benefits will be institutionalized into the ongoing practices and programs. For management plan, you should have clearly defined responsibilities, timelines and milestones. Reviewers really like to feel like they understand what's going to happen. So you've got to lay that out for them. Good enough time commitments so that the reviewers feel like the work can be done. People have enough time on it. And they want to see that you are representing or have lived experiences of the target population. For project evaluation can earn up to 25 points. How will you be measuring the fidelity of implementation and quantitative and qualitative data? Performance feedback, provide formative, diagnostic or interim data that is a periodic assessment of progress. So that's just a few highlights, but you should definitely read more in depth. Other requirements. So for your general requirements, you must make positive efforts to employ an advanced employment, qualified individuals with disabilities. You must involve individuals with disabilities or parents of individuals with disabilities ages birth through 26 in planning, implementing and evaluating the project. You must include a logic model. Oh, sorry, I'd gotten that wrong earlier. Logic model or other conceptual framework that was added there. So that the selection criterion does stand as is. A grantee funded under this competition must conduct an independent evaluation so that you must have an independent evaluator in order to do that. A few budget form highlights, please do read all of the directions for your budget form, but I wanted to point this out because it is different from past years in the travel section. It is permissible. This is directly from the directions there. It is permissible to include travel for a two day project director's conference and a one and one half day meeting in Washington, D.C. and each year of the project include travel of persons such as consultants on line six and the other section of the budget form includes six thousand dollars annually for support of this big program network and website. So six thousand dollars each year for submission. Let's go over the application submission, some submission tips and SAM registration, ineligible application and application tips. So for your submission, you must submit it electronically in Grants.gov. No other way is possible or accepted. It must be submitted before eleven fifty nine p.m. Washington, D.C. time, also known as Eastern Time on June 16th, 2026. Application narrative sections and all of their attachments to the application must be uploaded as a PDF read only non modifiable format or Microsoft Word file. PDF read only non modifiable format is preferred. Submission tips register early. Grants.gov may take five or more business days to complete. Be sure that your registration with the System for Award Management, also known as SAM, is current. Submit early. Don't wait until the last day to submit your application. Grants.gov will put a date time stamp on your application and then process it after it is fully uploaded. Verify the submission is OK. Verify that Grants.gov received your submission on time and that it was validated successfully. SAM grantees must have a unique entity identifier, also known as a UEI and a taxpayer identification number, TIN in SAM.gov. Be registered in the SAM. The government's primary registrant database. Provide your UEI number and TIN on your application. Maintain an active SAM registration with current information while your application is under review by the department. And if you are awarded a grant during the project period. I've said this a few times. There is repeating applications received after deadline June 16th at 1159 p.m. Washington, D.C. time will be ineligible. If you don't address the absolute priority or the statutory requirements, you will also be ineligible. And if you are not an SEA, as described earlier, you will be ineligible. And that is a mistake there. So, SEA. Application tips. Recommended organization, page limit spacing and font sizes facilitate the application review process. Read only non-modifiable PDF files facilitate the consolidating of application elements or review process. And then do read carefully the Grants.gov submission procedures and tips for applicants found in the ANI. To reach me, jennifer.coffee at ed.gov. I am happy to hear from you and will reply to you within 24 hours. Thank you so much.