School Budget- Challenges

I interview our principal's secretary- she is the financial secretary in our building. She has been doing work with this title for 13 years in our district at many different schools, so she seemed to be a great person to get a true perspective on these issues.

I asked her about our school budget and how it was decided. She said that it's all about revenues, expenditures, and enrollment. The biggest criticism she made about the school budget, the most challenging part, is how to equitably provide finances to all schools in our district.

Each school is given money based on the three above-mentioned factors. However, there is not consideration from school to school on the community, family, or student need or access to resources. Some of the schools in our district can raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in PTO fundraising money, while others (like mine) are lucky to fund raise $10,000 in a year beyond our district/state allocation. One interesting thing I learned from this conversation was a district policy around fundraising. If a school uses funds from a fundraiser to pay for personnel (if you are able to raise hundreds of thousands in addition to standard allocation, it makes sense you would hire more personnel to support school goals and learning), you must deposit 10% of funds raised in a district "pot" to be re-allocated to schools that aren't able to raise those kinds of funds in a year. This is one noteworthy way our district is trying to even the playing field a bit. However, 10% of 100k is certainly not the same as 100k, so schools that are able to raise money through powerful PTOs and rich community sources are absolutely at an advantage, no matter how you shake it.

Additionally, she mentioned that it is difficult to predict the special needs of our school site to set budget money aside. For instance, last year the math team requested several thousand dollars to purchase assessment and intervention online program. This year our LA team needs to purchase new books. I asked her how our administrators determine priority of need and she said that it must relate back to students and learning. Additionally, it special funds are allocated, it impacts the budget in other ways like we can't spend the same amount of money on supplies if some money gets taken up for a special and valuable request from a teacher or department. If the request comes late in the school year, often a deal or agreement is made for allocations of special resources to be put in the place the following year: this allows our principal's secretary to have a bit of foresight and plan better for what the budget allocation needs to be. And, above all, if the budget isn't flexible and there is no more money fundraised, the special requests for improving learning that comes from a teacher or dept. will be denied.