Financial Sustainability for School Districts
Driving long-term financial sustainability is more important than ever. It’s also incredibly hard for district leaders to do sustainability planning well when cost structures are so often disconnected from revenue.
But sustainability isn’t simply about finding ways to do more with less. Instead, we start by developing a deep understanding of your district’s cost structures and revenue forecast, and then developing a process to assess the ROI of various initiatives. That’s what we can bring to your district.
Our Approach to Helping Districts Achieve Sustainability
Benchmark Your Resource Levels
We benchmark spending and staffing to peer districts across different functions to provide quantitative insights into your overall resource use patterns. This work can help identify the highest priority areas for further investigation, provide justification for annual budgeting decisions, or help new leaders understand overall patterns of resource use within their system.
The Goal: Dive into your district’s biggest cost drivers to explore how they align with your top priorities for students.
Map Your Resource Use
We provide comprehensive analysis of how resource use aligns to district strategy. This work can help identify potential budget reduction or reallocation opportunities that align with your district’s long-term strategy and financial picture, always preserving the investments that are most critical to teachers and students.
The Goal: Ensure you make the right investments at the right time to make a long-lasting impact on students.
Reallocate Your Budget Strategically
Meeting student needs in financially sustainable ways requires a few common shifts away from historical resource use patterns, so we’ll help unpack and realign “legacy cost structures” such as central office, teacher compensation, special education, school portfolio, and school schedules to understand new ways of organizing that will prepare students for tomorrow.
The Goal: Unlock significant resources to shift them toward proven strategies for student learning.
Create Better Budget Processes
We strengthen annual budget processes by designing, documenting, and communicating key decision points, milestones, and roles. By co-facilitating new processes and providing individualized coaching and documentation, we build your leaders’ capacity to own these processes long-term.
The Goal: Equip your team to drive long-term financial success.
How We Partner With School Systems
We foster productive discussions around the tough, but necessary, tradeoffs leaders need to make to advance their efforts. The in-depth process helps create a shared fact base that leaders can use to engage stakeholders in the need to invest for the future, rather than just protecting what has always been.
“One thing I learned from our partnership [with ERS] in Boston Public Schools was that the investment matters. Where you put your dollars and where you choose to invest is going to make a difference.”
—Dr. Jim McIntyre, Dean of the College of Education and Assistant Provost for Academic Excellence at Belmont University
Driving Sustainability in Portland Public Schools
The Opportunity
During the 2022-23 school year, we led Portland Public Schools (PPS) leaders through district resource mapping to assess their current resource use.
The Mapping Process
By analyzing data and facilitating working sessions, we helped the PPS cabinet and board better understand the district-level financial picture, school-level resource equity, and current teacher and student experiences.
Our analyses helped PPS leaders make strategic, informed decisions now that will build toward more effective and sustainable resource allocations in the long term. These decisions included:
- Investing in school-based professional development by reducing 64 centrally managed Teacher on Special Assignment FTE and adding 92 instructional coach FTE to school sites to improve consistency in job-embedded professional development and instructional leadership.
- Supporting school leaders by providing them with the flexibility needed to spend funding to best meet their school’s context.
- Making informed budget decisions during a period of overall budget reductions.
The Results
Our interconnected analyses increased transparency around current districtwide resource use and enabled the PPS leadership team and board to establish a shared understanding of how the system uses its people, time, and money.
Other Financial Sustainability Partners
Let’s Work Together
Ready to build a budget that works better for your students? Fill out the form below to reach out to our team of experts.