The Alliance for Excellence in School Budgeting is a group of school districts from across the country working to improve their budget processes by making better resource allocation decisions to support improved student outcomes.
The group was formed in 2015 by the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) and will host its sixth gathering—and first virtual meeting—of member districts later this year. Districts participating in the Alliance do so as a leadership team, with the superintendent or lead academic person collaborating hand in hand with the chief financial officer (or other lead budget person) in making budget and planning improvements. The willingness to join Alliance as a leadership team is the only requirement for admission to this group of 100 plus districts.
Districts that have been involved with the Alliance range in demographics: urban, suburban, and rural; facing budget cuts or in growth mode; large (hundreds of thousands of students) and small (single school district); and high achieving or near takeover from their state’s education authority.
Regardless of demographics, the Alliance members are committed not only to working with their counterparts to improve the budget process and student outcomes, but also to learning and networking with other members of the group to further share their experiences and gain additional insights into how to make improvements in their districts.
The framework of recommendations that form the basis for the work of Alliance members—the Best Practices in School Budgeting—include a range of commentary and resources that can help districts in these ever-evolving and difficult times.
Best Practices in School Budgeting Framework
The foundation for the Alliance’s work is GFOA’s Best Practices in School Budgeting framework. An overview will help provide context for not only how Alliance districts are implementing GFOA’s recommendations, but also why.
The Best Practices in School Budgeting framework centers on five major steps:
- Plan and prepare.
- Set instructional priorities.
- Pay for priorities.
- Implement plan.
- Ensure sustainability.
The lead recommendation within step 1 is collaboration with agreement between the academic and finance leaders to pursue budget process improvements and alignment with the support of the superintendent. The framework emphasizes setup and follow-through related to all aspects of the budget and planning processes.
Preparing for the budget process includes not only better collaboration, but also an analysis of current levels of student achievement and engagement of internal and external stakeholders. By examining and broadly communicating the current environment, stakeholders—whether academic, financial, or community—will have a realistic view of what is (or is not) possible.
For many, this analysis is even more relevant as the COVID-19 pandemic and related impacts will likely change funding levels and create a whole host of new needs and challenges. These steps build better understanding and cooperation by developing robust goals with measurable outcomes, by implementing root cause analysis to ensure that the underlying problem is being addressed, and by developing and prioritizing strategies and programs to achieve the district’s goals within the available means.
We all know that districts are better when they share and help one another. That is truer now given the challenges many districts and communities face.
This work cannot be done in silos. It must be undertaken as a team, with all perspectives and responsibilities considered to ensure that key issues are not overlooked and to build broad support for what the district is working to accomplish and how spending patterns may need to be adjusted.
After the strategies are developed and prioritized, the framework focuses on funding implementation, including a careful examination of the programs the district is currently funding, the programs’ effectiveness and overall alignment with district goals, and how funding may be reassigned to higher-priority uses.
The framework also includes a series of recommendations for ensuring that the strategies and programs funded are implemented with fidelity. They include monitoring results to confirm that the implementation is on schedule and that the anticipated improvements in academic and related performance are progressing as intended.
Additionally, the framework offers a template for a strategic financial plan and a more streamlined budget presentation—both of which keep the district’s goals and strategies at the forefront.
The underpinning themes throughout the framework are some of the key areas of focus for districts that participate in the Alliance: (1) collaboration, (2) continuous improvement in examining the results and the processes themselves for maximum efficiency and effectiveness, (3) the long-term forecast for improvements sought and for the financial outlook, and finally (4) procedural justice, which emphasizes broadly communicating how and why decisions are made.
All of the recommendations from GFOA’s Best Practices in School Budgeting framework are supported with additional tools, case studies, and other information at the Smarter School Spending website (smarterschoolspending.org). Nearly all the district examples and related information on the site come from districts that have been involved with the Alliance for Excellence in School Budgeting.
We all know that districts are better when they share and help one another. That is truer now given the challenges many districts and communities face. The Alliance provides a forum for collaborating, learning, and contributing ideas so we can all better serve our students and communities.
Alliance Work to Date
Every fall for the past five years, GFOA has hosted more than 100 high-level staff members from about 35 districts at the annual meeting of the Alliance for Excellence in School Budgeting. Each event begins with districts examining their current budget process to identify pain points and areas for improvement. This self-assessment not only promotes discussion among district attendees, but also helps inform the districts’ work during the remainder of the two-day meeting.
In addition to using the time to reflect on and improve their budget and planning processes, many districts have found attendance as a team to be invaluable, with time to focus with fewer distractions and a central purpose.
Once districts have determined the areas for improvement, the meeting shifts to presentations from districts and other outside experts on how principal elements of the Best Practices framework are being implemented. Key to these presentations are guided exercises and question-and-answer sessions to dive deeper into how these examples and tools can be used to leverage improvements in attendees’ districts.
To date, a wide range of districts have presented their work at the meeting—from some of the largest districts in country to those representing the majority of districts, which serve students of several thousand. Outside experts add additional insights to the meeting from their experiences within an even broader range of districts; they have included representatives from District Management Group, Education Resource Strategies, and Pivot Learning.
Some of the Alliance districts highlighting their work and progress on budget process improvements have included the following:
North Shore School District 112, Illinois. The district is working toward striking a balance between improving academic performance and addressing long-standing issues with its aging infrastructure. Using the GFOA framework, the district adopted a more inclusive budget process to better engage stakeholders throughout the district with a focus on multiyear planning and sustainability. In addition, the district established performance metrics for key areas and engaged the community as it went through the difficult process of closing buildings to free up funds to improve remaining buildings.
River Trails School District 26, Illinois. River Trails piloted GFOA’s Best Practices framework for a specific area of need: boosting lagging math scores. The district conducted a root cause analysis to determine why its students were underperforming in mathematics and then structured a goal with measurable outcomes to set expectations for improvement. Based on its analysis, the district hired a math interventionist and put in place other programs, using the GFOA framework to help prioritize funding and create implementation plans to follow progress.
School District of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. The district was in the midst of a five-year strategic plan when it joined the Alliance, but realized a different approach was needed after more in-depth examination of its budget and related processes. Subsequently, it developed a new strategic plan that focused on actionable objectives with expectations for completing deliverables and monitoring progress in key areas. The district is using this progress to further enhance the strategic plan with its new superintendent.
School District of Palm Beach County, Florida. The SDPBC was looking at ways to more effectively and efficiently meet the needs of students with disabilities. The special-education director and budget director intensively collaborated to find better and more cost-effective ways to deliver services to its students with disabilities by analyzing the data and processes related to providing services. The result was a shift to a funding model that focused on student needs rather than staff-centered needs, with the district starting to flatten its special-education-related expenditures while maintaining services and academic performance.
Upper Moreland School District, Pennsylvania. Upper Moreland used the Best Practices in School Budgeting framework to help support better processes and decision making with the evaluation of academic programs, as well as the budget process itself. Data-driven decision making moves the district’s efforts toward the creation of better goals and better use of its curriculum framework cycle. The partnership between the academic and finance staffs has led to better conversations about overall district needs and has helped expand financial conversations from being just about spending limitations toward collaborative problem solving.
Facilitating Best Practices
In addition to the district and outside expert presentations, GFOA’s staff helps facilitate working sessions to encourage sharing among attendees and to provide districts with takeaways to help promote the continuation of their work. For example, district attendees develop an “elevator speech” to help provide consistent messaging for both external and internal stakeholders as to why budget and planning process changes are needed to help promote better academic outcomes.
Another example is holding separate sessions for the academic and finance attendees to independently share thoughts on what they would like their peers on the other side to know about the challenges of providing quality instruction and of balancing the budget, among others. They then rejoin as a group to talk more about concerns from each side.
Again, while the meeting of the Alliance later this year may look different in how districts come together, it will not change the core goals of the group and the meeting: to collaboratively learn, discuss, and share district experiences with making budget and strategic planning process improvements to best align resources to promote the best possible student outcomes.
Part of a Larger Effort
GFOA’s school budgeting framework and the Alliance for Excellence in School Budgeting program are part of GFOA’s larger efforts not only to improve organizations’ budget processes and overall financial management practices, but also to determine how we can support better overall strategic planning efforts and in turn organizational resiliency to provide necessary services and supports to communities.
The work of Alliance districts has served as the basis for the next evolution of the advice and recommendations that GFOA provides not only to districts, but to all types of municipalities and other local governments. GFOA’s Financial Foundations Framework includes these lessons learned to help organizations improve their financial position now and create a strong foundation for a thriving community over the long-term.
In addition, and of particular note during the uncertainty and likely revenue losses school districts and local governments are anticipating, GFOA has been working these past few months in quarantine updating its fiscal first aid resources.
The fiscal first aid resources were developed in response to the Great Recession of 2008, with updates to the resources incorporating lessons learned from that crisis and oriented toward responding to impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The resources include thinking through both near-term and long-term strategies in response to the crisis and commentary on which tactics may be riskier than they appear.
These resources help complement some of the longer-term thinking that is part of GFOA’s school budgeting framework and the need for better alignment of organizational outcomes and the allocation of resources in response to the changed environment from the impacts of the pandemic.