David Ruehs

ED 636 Policy and Educational Finance

Budgeting Activity

Major points set forth by Sorenson and Goldsmith:

- Budgeting and vision building must be done simultaneously in planning to increase every
student’s academic success and well-being.
- The best way to make a school successful is to foster a culture in which the stakeholders
have a shared vision of the school’s purpose.
- Shared visions, planning and budget models are great, but they do not happen
immediately. Leaders must be strategic in their planning through collaboration and
communication.
- Failing to plan is planning to fail.
- Budgeting is an ongoing process throughout the year and instructional leaders need to
maintain flexibility to accommodate present needs.
- The budget development process is an integral part of visioning and planning from which
all members of the learning community have a voice, a stake, and a right to impact the
academic success of students.
- The development of an effective school budget needs teamwork, dedicated efforts, and
proper coding. It is not easy but is necessary for the success of all, and is done with
strong leadership.

Questions to ask the administrator:

- What are the budget amounts that we work with at the high school?
o Discretionary - $625K, staff – around $20 million, entire district $60 million
- What do the elementary schools work with?
o Based per pupil, so different in district per building, but not a lot
- What kind of budgeting structure do you think we have adopted here?
o Site based – not money per pupil, mostly decided with department chairs
o Zero based the first year because of suspicion of spending practices in
departments
- What is the hardest thing about budgeting in your role?
o Involving department chairs and figuring out big ticket items from year to year
and being strategic, some departments need to save spending until next cycle
o Declining enrollment to cut discretionary funding
- How do you split up the discretionary funds?
o Look at the past, work with Greg, and ask for more, cut back when can, protect
money so frugal with staff
- How do we support such expensive CTE programs?
o Industrial tech working with other people’s money – Donated and business
partners
- How do we afford a $200,000 laser?
o Unspent balance kept growing and three years of convincing to align with district
vision
- Who does the paper work to find our spending authority?
o Financial director does, develop overall spending authority
 - Most interesting part of budgeting that you have learned in the role?
o Agency fund- run by itself but can make money and be self-sustaining – stays in
that account

Summary of the discussion:

I am afraid that if I were to try to hit on all of those answers and compare each one to the
text, my paper length limit would definitely surpass the two-page limit. I have chosen to include
truncated answers to my questions and then summarize the most common thread to his answers
that kept coming up in almost every answer and in our text.
Mr. Keane does almost all of the budgeting in a collaborative and transparent manner that
is aligned to our district’s vision of having a profoundly positive impact on each student's adult
quality of life brought about by each student's individual and collective educational experience.
He jokingly said that he is not the rich uncle who graciously bestows money on people who ask
nicely enough. He works with department chairs, the finance director, the superintendent, and
other administrators, at least monthly or even more often at times. Sorenson and Goldsmith
discuss over and over and over again how important collaboration, shared vision, and collective
goals are when it comes to leading school buildings and investing in our students.
At the high school, we have a discretionary budget of $625,000, but not all departments
are created equal. English and Social Studies each have a $800 budget from year to year and the
Career and Technical Education (CTE) program has a $38,000 budget this year. As he works
with the department chairs and the district leadership, they work together to be strategic on what
types of “big ticket” purchases need to be made in the upcoming years like a text book series or
equipment and machinery for CTE programming. In fact, the manufacturing program just
installed a $200,000 laser that was heavily subsidized with Carl Perkins money, multiple years of
rising unspent balance, and matching funds from local businesses. Purchases like that could not
be made in a district the size of ours with out direct collaboration with stakeholders all across the
community.
One aspect to my questions that I found most interesting from Mr. Keane was the account
structure in Iowa called an agency fund. We have one set up in our food service program and the
building and trades program. An agency fund can create profit that goes back into that fund, and
they can become self-sustaining so general fund dollars can be spend elsewhere. Our food
service program has become a bakery hub for multiple neighboring school districts. We are
baking other schools’ bread and rolls and selling and delivering it to them. That money can be
spent on capital improvements and staff in the kitchen to support the program. In the same way,
the construction and trade program will be building houses, selling them for a profit, and then
using the extra money to build the next house the following year. When I got into teaching
middle school math 13 years ago, I had not anticipated learning