• Do you know where you are currently budgeting and expending your funds?
• Do you use SMARTER goals to support your strate- gic plan through your budget?
• Do you use data-driven analysis to support decision-making?
In addition to being based on a continuous improve- ment cycle, the Best Budgeting Practices also provide a framework that is embedded with change management. The practices are not intended to replace your existing budget methods; instead, they are designed to provide a framework to improve those practices.
Plan and Prepare
One of the foundational steps to begin implementing smarter school spending is to establish a partnership between academics and finance under the superinten- dent’s leadership. Working together, the finance officer, academic officer, and superintendent translate a coherent instructional strategy into dollars.
Limiting the governance of the budget process to the finance officer may have been adequate when the budget process was considered a financial exercise to allocate dollars to line items, but when districts view it as a strategic activity to distribute scarce resources most effectively based on student achievement, they realize the governance structure needs to be expanded. A governance structure is a system of management processes and structures that help steer how the budget process operates. It gives key participants (e.g., the aca- demic officer) a more significant stake in the success of the budget process without asking participants to micro- manage the budget process. A typical governance struc- ture recruits executive leaders from different functions within the district to work together as a committee. Organizational resistance is the most challenging hur- dle to overcome in implementing a change to the bud- geting process; the instinct is to continue using familiar methods rather than implementing changes. Therefore, the school district’s challenge is to cultivate key stake- holders’ willingness to embrace new ideas and strate- gies. A shared effort between the finance department and the academic and instructional departments will help ease the task of analyzing the comparative worth of dif- ferent goals or programs.
A governance structure provides the forum for that cooperation to happen. If the participants in the gover- nance structure understand how the budget process is intended to help them improve results, they will likely be more enthusiastic participants.
The governance committee should identify a limited number of criteria against which to judge the success of the budget process, including measures to determine if
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the criteria are being met. Establishing standards for suc- cess helps the governance committee maintain focus on what is most important in the budget process. Transparency is a key tenet of any budget process. Stakeholders need to receive more than line-item details on the funding levels for the upcoming school year. A strategy to drastically improve student achievement will almost always require significant changes in how resources are allocated. A budget process should include a strategy for communicating to the participants, stake- holders, and general public about how the process works, what decisions were made, and why. When implementing a communications strategy, the messenger, message, and communications channel will be slightly different depending on the audience. Thus, it is essential for the district to identify its target audience and designate a credible messenger to relay the budget message. As part of implementing a communications strategy, participants, stakeholders, and the general pub- lic should be given opportunities to provide feedback to which the district must respond accordingly.
Setting Instructional Priorities
A school district should assess learning achievement across grade levels to determine whether students are making progress toward college or career readiness. Per- formance data provide the starting point for determining the current state of student performance in quantifiable terms. The district can use this quantified performance baseline to determine how students are currently per- forming, identify a desired future level of performance, and analyze the gap between the two, both district-wide and for individual school sites.
Performance data also form the basis for tracking progress relative to district and school goals and evaluat- ing whether the district and schools have accomplished their objectives. The district must understand where it is today to develop a goal for where it wants to be. Ambitious goals for student achievement are a start- ing point for the school district budget process. Goals articulate the board and executive leadership’s vision for the district. District-wide goals are the basis for distrib- uting performance objectives to individual school sites and district’s goals should require that every student make progress.
District-wide goals should then be translated into goals for individual school sites. While not strictly part of the budget process, school goals should become the basis for goals pursued by principals, teachers, parents, and students.
Goals form the basis for evaluating potential invest- ments of funds. The difference or gap between the goal and current performance can be used to begin a dialog questioning existing methods of serving students and to
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