Let's Get Fiscal

Let’s Get Fiscal

By Dr. Sam Robinson

Identifying school district employee needs and making budget projections is as simple as understanding revenue and expenditures with a student-first approach. For a simple and successful budget projection, administrators should budget for 90% of expected revenue and keep expenditures within 90% of those revenue projections. In reality, it is the details of projections and administrative and departmental staff collaboration that make employee staffing needs and budget projections accurate and successful.

As humans, we are creators of habit. Determining staffing needs and making budget projections requires a good understanding of the revenue and expenditure habits of your school district. For minimal staffing with maximum efficiencies, it is important to form a good habit of communicating with stakeholders while understanding student needs and requirements. Employee staffing needs are pretty simple. Understanding

student enrollment is the first priority. Is enrollment increasing or decreasing? Are the special populations that require specialized teachers increasing or decreasing? What support personnel are needed to support and manage the school and the district? Once these questions have been answered after collaboration with site and district administrators, budgeters can move on to the next phase of personnel, evaluation.

Administrators working on budgets should evaluate student programming from academics to extracurriculars and the student-to-teacher ratios needed for the district based upon identified student and community needs. This will not always be what the instructional staff may want, but it might be the best fit to achieve desired outcomes within the fiscal limitations of the budget.

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Finally, budgeters should identify constraints. Can the budget support additional personnel to meet needs and wants? Are the staffing decisions sustainable over a period of time? Are new or additional personnel impacting and improving student learning? Based upon the answers to these questions and by utilizing the input of those closest to students – teachers, principals, and departmental staff –administrators can make adequate and sustainable personnel decisions.

In order to meet student and community needs, it is important to make clear budget projections. Predicting revenue and expenditures for school districts might appear to be a simple endeavor, but in reality, it can be quite challenging if not enough thought and data review has been done. This is why I utilize an approach of habit and past history. By reviewing previous revenue and expenditure patterns, administrators can put together budgets within 90-95%

accuracy. It is important to always begin with revenue and to evaluate the following: one-time previousyear revenue, how revenues have increased or decreased over a five-year period, and how to manage increases or decreases in revenue. Questions to ask might include, “Did we purchase a bus?”, “Is revenue trending up, down, or remaining relatively flat?”, and “How are we staffing based on revenue increases or decreases?”

A five-year look back is always a good idea to make sure previous years’ data is taken into account. This can demonstrate patterns and help identify changes in trends in revenue or expenditures to make future projections. As stated before, we are creators of habit. The spending habits of previous years do not typically change, especially in regard to recurring costs. Many times, onetime expenditures will occur in a pattern, such as transportation purchases or repairing heat and air systems. These may not occur every year, but rest assured, there will be an expenditure within a five-year period.

Setting spending limits is important to establishing and projecting a budget. Administrators will know their expenditure limits because they have done the revenue review. Once expenditure limits are established, budget projection and formation can begin.

Administrators can develop budget projects by doing the following five things:

1. Evaluate patterns (revenue and expenditures).

2. Identify changes in revenue.

3. Identify new expenditures.

4. Identify eliminated expenditures.

5. Reduce or increase expenditures based on student and community needs.

Once administrators have put in the time for collaboration, review, and projection, a budget will begin to emerge, first as a projection and then, with more collaboration, as a working budget centered around students and improved student outcomes. ■

Dr. Sam Robinson is the Chief Financial Officer for Enid Public Schools. In May 2023, Dr. Robinson was named the 2023 School Business Official of the Year by the Oklahoma Association of School Business Professionals.

“By reviewing previous revenue and expenditure patterns, administrators can put together budgets within 90-95% accuracy.”