Using AI to Build Interactive Tools
Below are the steps to building an interactive financial simulator for your district, and an example of the Ithaca City School District putting these tools into practice.
Step 1: Decide Your Purpose. What need will this tool fulfill? Will it focus on long-term enrollment trends? Future capital project needs? Tax rates and levy projections? Be mindful of what will help and not add too much complexity to the conversation.
Step 2: Define the Rules of the Game. Based on your purpose, collect resources for your plan, such as state regulations and district policies for class sizes, your state aid funding formula, demographic projections, bargaining unit contracts, etc.
In school finance, adding a single student does not simply cost a fraction of a teacher; it may be the tipping point that requires adding a new class and a full teacher salary.
Step 3: Build the Logic Script with AI. You do not need to be a software developer to create this tool. You can prompt an AI assistant to generate the necessary code. Try a prompt like: "Create a calculator where I can input total PK-12 enrollment. Use the attached class size policies to adjust staffing, and the attached contracts to project staffing costs, as the user changes the enrollment number in the calculator."
Step 4: Expand the Model. A comprehensive district model accounts for the entire educational ecosystem. Help your AI expand the simulator by identifying other key variables that influence the outputs:
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Special Education: Input a percentage of students with IEPs to automatically trigger the need for additional mandated service providers, such as speech, OT, and PT.
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Revenue formulas: Input your enrollment-based state aid formula to get a revenue estimate along with a cost estimate. Feed in your property values to get a tax estimate, your grants, and your Medicaid services to layer those on as well.
Essential Interactive Features
Ithaca City School District: From Simulator to System
The Ithaca City School District (ICSD) embraced using AI to complement internal financial expertise, starting by building an interactive budget simulator that allows users to explore real-time financial scenarios.
From there, ICSD leveraged AI tools to add functions, rapidly prototype, and refine a more expansive web-based application, moving beyond traditional spreadsheet presentations. This allowed the business office to focus on validating assumptions and aligning the model with district policies, contracts, and state aid formulas.
Key principles underpinning the ICSD model include:
The result goes beyond a single simulator into a broader “Budget Explorer” platform that connects multiple financial tools into one cohesive experience.
This evolution reflects a key reality: No single model can fully capture the complexity of school finance. Instead, this is the starting point for a connected suite of applications that allow users to explore operating budgets, tax impacts, and capital planning within a unified framework. It is a public learning tool, an exploratory process where community members can adjust key variables like enrollment and budget growth, and immediately see the downstream impact on staffing and taxes.
The technical skills unlocked by using AI give SBOs the potential to redefine financial communications. The goal is no longer just to present information, but to create an interactive learning environment where stakeholders can explore, question, and better understand the complexities of school finance.