New Workshop Series: Tune Up Your District’s Budget Process
Registration is now closed for the 2026 Virtual Budget Process Workshops.
Does this year’s budget process look the same as all the previous ones? Are siloes and misalignment making it impossible to create a shared strategic vision? Do you want to strategically allocate every dollar in your budget toward students?
We can help.
Over the course of five virtual, interactive workshops, ERS budgeting experts will guide you in fine-tuning your formulas and practices to strengthen your budget process for the upcoming season and beyond.
You’ll walk away with:
- Four tactical ways to evolve your next budget-planning process
- Best practices and insights from other districts
- New tools and templates to use immediately—including training on how to use them effectively
Who Should Participate
The District Budget Process Tune-Up: Five Steps to More Strategic Budgeting is for you if:
- You’re a budget director who needs practical strategies for making your district’s budgeting processes more agile, flexible, and transparent
- You’re a CFO or superintendent interested in implementing an ROI system to help decide what programs to stop, keep, or scale
- You’re a budget team looking for a clear blueprint for systematically evolving your district’s budget process
This workshop series is designed to support mid- to large-districts (enrollment >5,000) who are looking to optimize their budgeting process across multiple schools and programs. Individuals are welcome, but district teams are encouraged to attend together. This work is often easier to apply when multiple district stakeholders are involved—and you’ll receive a discount on registration.
If you’re not sure whether this content would be applicable to you, reach out anytime!
Format and Details
$750 per person or $500 per person for teams of three or more.
You can pay via credit card at the time of registration or register now and request an invoice.
August 5–September 2 | Wednesdays, 1:00–2:30 p.m.
- An optional pre-call (before Workshop 1) with our facilitator to share what you’re hoping to get out of the series
- Five 75-minute virtual workshops, plus an optional live Q&A at the end
- An optional action-planning and coaching call (after Workshop 5) with our facilitator to help establish your exact next steps
What We’ll Cover
Many finance workshops focus on concepts—but this one is built around implementation.
We developed the tools in this series through direct district work, shaping our approach based on real budgeting challenges. ERS’ budgeting experts have collective decades of on-the-ground district finance experience, and they’ll share critical insights to guide district leaders in building a better budgeting process for their districts.
Here’s what to expect from The District Budget Process Tune-Up: Five Steps to More Strategic Budgeting.
Budget teams are facing a moment of intense uncertainty and pressure—making strategic budgeting a vital tool for unlocking financial sustainability. In this first session, you’ll learn the core principles of strategic budgeting: How to establish a clear vision of your district’s priorities, ground stakeholders in a shared understanding of your fiscal reality, and adopt practices that optimize decision-making at all levels.
The uncertainty of the future will increasingly require district leaders to step up to a difficult challenge: Determine what’s working for students and teachers, and decide which investments to keep, sale, or cut. In this second session, we’ll cover SSROI, our proven approach to assessing whether investments are resulting in your district’s desired impact.
Districts typically spend most of their funding at the school level, so it’s essential that school funding formulas are not only adequate but also equitable, transparent, and flexible. In this third session, we’ll guide you in assessing your funding formulas and optimizing your budgeting and planning processes to support strategic, effective resource use.
Most district budgeting processes simply weren’t built for the challenges leaders face today. In this fourth session, we’ll home in on managing intense uncertainty, preserving flexibility, and infusing agility into a traditionally linear budgeting process.
No CFO or budget director took their job simply to make budget cuts—but that’s the reality for many districts across the country right now. In this fifth session, we’ll help you make the best of a challenging situation by analyzing the tradeoffs that will both mitigate the negative impacts of reductions and sustain the most critical investments.
Can’t attend every workshop? You can still register! Workshops will be recorded and shared afterward so you can catch up asynchronously. If you’d prefer, you can also send another district team member in your absence.
Interested in bringing a budgeting workshop to your district or staying informed about future opportunities?
Looking for other learning opportunities? Click here to view upcoming events and workshops.
“I now have a deeper and broader understanding of division-level budget development and management, positioning me to more effectively align resources with the needs of our schools and students.”
——Monique Booth, Chief of Schools, Chesterfield County Public Schools