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student grow

student grow

By Matt Bubness

SENIOR MANAGER GOVERNMENT FINANCE OFFICERS ASSOCIATION

Budgeting for Results

Leveraging Evidence-Based Funding Including Core FTE Recommendations to Improve Budgeting and Planning

Evidence-Based Funding (EBF) is designed to help support districts provide funding and services to students and monitor outcomes with particular attention to those students with additional needs – including low-income, English language learners and those with disabilities. In addition, EBF includes potential for tiered funding to provide additional support for districts that lack current resources to make investments in specific areas or core investments. The statute calls for 99 percent of all appropriations to fund the poorest districts. The adequacy target for these districts is determined by staffing ratios or per student calculations coupled with enrollment in specific areas to determine a level of adequacy for each particular district. The specific areas range from student-teacher ratios for a teachers and other staff supporting students in buildings (core investments) to per student amounts spent on areas such as gifted, professional development and central office (per student investments).

Core Investments • Core Teachers • Nurse • Specialist Teachers • Supervisory Aide • Instructional Facilitators • Librarian • Core Intervention Teachers • Librarian Aide/Media Tech • Guidance Counselor • Pricipal & A t. Principal • School Site Staff • Substitute Teachers

Per Student Investments • Gifted • Student Activities • Profe ional Development • Operations & Maintenance • Instructional Material • Central Office • A e ments • Employ Benefits • Computer/Tech Equipment Diverse Student Investments • Low Income • English Learners • Special Education

Based on a district’s enrollment in these areas, an adequacy target is calculated and compared to current available state and local resources. The gap between the adequacy target and current resources determines how a district is eligible for additional state funding outside of the Base Funding Minimum (BFM) (assuming additional state funding is available, with no additional funding provided in fiscal year 2021).

In addition, the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) plans to expand the role of the EBF Spending Plan, incorporating it into the annual budgeting template beginning in fiscal year 2023. As with any change or shift in state required reporting, and particularly funding related — the reasons for effecting the change are numerous. While the changes are likely well intentioned, changes are often difficult to implement and can blur any benefit that districts may realize as a result of the switch to EBF.

A Tool to Help Focus Your Budgeting While not something districts have a choice to implement, EBF’s adequacy targets and spending plan can be leveraged to help focus district efforts and resources around research-based practices that focus on better student outcomes. Specifically, this can be used to help improve thinking around budget and planning decisions as a number of the key components of EBF align with best practices in strategic planning and budgeting.

The Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) has developed a framework to help support better budgeting and planning for school districts that focuses on best aligning resources with student outcomes – the Best Practices in School Budgeting (available at https:// iasbo.tools/gfoa-best-practices). The focus of the GFOA best practices align with and compliment key areas of EBF and can help support districts to utilize EBF in a more comprehensive way of examining all funds, staff and other resources to ensure alignment with needed areas of student performance and prioritizing what can be funded and implemented.

Alignment of goals and strategies help districts maintain focus in terms of key items of concern – whether under performance in specific student populations, graduation rates and staff professional development among other areas. This focus helps not only staff direct their valuable time and effort, but it also directs where dollars should be spent for the most impact. This is why the focus on prioritizing district needs is so crucial in terms of allocating scarce time, staff and funds to those areas in most need – and the need for a robust budget process to do so.

The GFOA best practice framework for a comprehensive budget process includes collaboration, communication, goal setting, prioritization, long-term planning and analysis of results. The recommendations are centered on five major steps – with each offering further detail and advice on improving budget, planning and related processes:

1. Plan and Prepare 2. Set Instructional Priorities 3. Pay for Priorities 4. Implement Plan 5. Ensure Sustainability

To help facilitate implementation of the Best Practices in School Budgeting framework – GFOA has also developed a companion website – Smarter School Spending (SSS, www.smarterschoolspending.org). The website contains a host of free resources including case studies, templates, examples and other tools to help implement a better budget process.

Fostering Alignment & Better Prioritization Illinois is not alone in this switch to a reporting and distribution of funds done in conjunction with better alignment and reporting of student outcomes. California implemented its Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) several years ago which requires significant reporting of district information as compared to EBF – including goals and strategies at the district level and at individual school sites. In addition, the LCFF requires reporting for a number of specific student populations and more explicit guidance on monitoring of performance. Tools and resources from the GFOA’s SSS website and key recommendations from GFOA school budgeting best practices were used by a number of California school districts to help implement the LCFF requirements – with districts seeing added benefit to their budget and planning processes by leveraging these resources to implement LCFF. Similarly, the GFOA best practices framework and associated resources on the SSS site can help support and better leverage EBF to turn the more reporting-oriented exercise to a greater benefit for examining and improving a district’s planning and budgeting processes through better alignment and prioritization. In addition, aspects of the framework can help further examine EBF adequacy targets to determine where a district may not be meeting targets, how this may be impacting student performance and how additional resources can be prioritized to improve any deficiencies.

Collaboration that Goes Deeper The key premise of GFOA’s best practices is better collaboration between the instructional/academic and finance staff within the district – a recommendation echoed on the EBF spending plan form. While all finance directors and staff have interactions with their academic/instructional and other peers throughout the district, the best practices framework looks for that collaboration to go deeper in order to gain a shared understanding of broader district needs and challenges. This shared understanding of district needs then serves as a basis for collectively discussing how best to move forward to address the district’s needs. The best practices recommend that the collaboration goes beyond just the traditional budget process of allocating funds and related decisions – but also setting goals, examining student and program outcomes and looking at the longrange sustainability of the organization. This improved collaboration will help in the allocation of funds provided by EBF and in examining adequacy targets to then help facilitate maximizing the use of funds, examining progress made and any needed course corrections.

Shifts in funding, priorities and the related can cause anxiety – particularly as it relates to educating students. That is why communication and engagement are central tenants of the GFOA best practices framework. Building upon collaboration, the framework recommends not only external engagement with stakeholders, but also internal engagement of staff districtwide. Broadly communicating district needs and goals and also the strategies for accomplishing the goals, will emphasize to staff what the district’s focus is and why.

Creating Community Confidence This is also essential for the broader community – as the pressure to pursue other strategies or spend funds elsewhere can be strong, and while stakeholders may not agree with decisions that were made, they will at least have a better understanding as to why these decisions were made. This concept of procedural fairness (or procedural justice) is also central to the GFOA best practice framework and embedded throughout the budget and planning process recommendations. Procedural fairness is rooted in the criminal justice system and advocates for transparency of process to better understand why decisions were made and ultimately create more confidence in the decisionmaking process.

Planning for the Long Haul While EBF may be more focused on the current year — the GFOA best practices framework also helps provide support for longer-term discussions, which is crucial to each district’s planning and budgeting processes. While the pressures of short-term budgetary needs and the like may dominate budget discussions for the upcoming fiscal year, district leadership cannot lose sight of the impacts that current year discussions have on longer range student outcomes or fiscal pressures. This is even more true given the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges it presents related to short-term needs to provide continuity of instruction and then also identifying long-term fiscal and related impacts. While most financial and budget discussions focus on the current and following fiscal year, strategies and programs that are funded may take years to realize benefits and improved outcomes – particularly for areas such as early interventions.

Making Data-Informed Decisions Related to outcomes, the EBF spending plan places focus on using data to inform allocation of EBF dollars. This is also echoed as an area of importance by the GFOA best practices framework for school budgeting and also GFOA’s broader best practices on performance measures and budget monitoring. Establishing performance measures should include a clear articulation of what is being measured and why to establish clear expectations for those involved. This process could include incorporation of adequacy targets as well to help leverage a required data point into the conversation on overall district performance. Performance measures should play a key role in budget monitoring. GFOA strongly advocates moving beyond a more traditional budget monitoring process that focuses not just on whether an area is over/under budget, but also includes discussions as to whether or not the program/ service being funded is achieving expected outcomes and more importantly what course corrections can be made if the program is not performing well

GFOA best practices on performance measures and budget monitoring are available at: www.gfoa.org/materials/performance-measures www.gfoa.org/materials/budget-monitoring

Setting Goals and Strategies Ever more pressing with the expected revenue impacts of the pandemic is alignment and prioritization of strategies and programs to focus on areas of greatest need and most impact for students. EBF touches on this with questions on how funds will be used to achieve goals and also adequacy targets for investments; however, districts will need to have broader discussions as to how this impacts all district funds and activities. The foundation for this is robust goals and ensuring measurability aspects are included to gauge whether or not goals have been achieved or at least are making progress.

GFOA’s best practices advocate for a modified SMART goal framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound) to include considerations for making a goal resonate and a high-level discussion of cost. These goals should then be supported by strategies (or programs) that will allow the district to achieve its goals — funding new strategies only if they align with stated goals while also evaluating existing strategies to check for alignment.

Smarter School Spending Tools GFOA’s Smarter School Spending site includes a range of freely available tools and other resources – below is a sample of available resources:

> Strategic Abandonment Tool https://iasbo.tools/gfoa-strategic

> Cost Savings Options

https://iasbo.tools/gfoa-savings > Instructional Priority Planner https://iasbo.tools/gfoa-planner

A key consideration in evaluating strategies, whether new or existing, is an understanding that if one is either not funded or discontinued that the strategy was not necessarily a bad idea, but something that was not a top priority for the district based on stated goals and the identified, current needs of the district. This helps to establish the relative priorities of the district and maintain focus on those areas of greatest need. Again, the process for how strategies were selected should be transparent and well communicated to ensure understanding as to how decisions were made to instill Academic Return on Investment trust and confidence in the process. After selecting A concept researched further by GFOA is strategies, GFOA strongly recommends closely monitoring Academic Return on Investment (A-ROI). implementation to ensure strategies selected are given the A-ROI is an examination of not only student best opportunity to of success from the start. outcomes, but also the associated costs

and number of students impacted. Even

More robust goals — as part of a longer-range strategic if a more precise A-ROI approach is not plan — will help set the direction and priorities for the fully implemented the underlying principle district, but districts will still need to find funds to cover of cost-effectiveness can be broadly shortfalls, fund new initiatives, fund areas of potential need applied. Effectiveness is a key component from EBF adequacy targets and other related financial needs. As part of the best practices in school budgeting as articulated in GFOA recommendations framework, GFOA recommends leveraging a number of on robust performance measurement. tools and other concepts to examine current expenditures However, effectiveness should be examined and also ensure robust conversations around cost- in a broader context to ensure that even if effectiveness of programs and strategies. programs and strategies are effective, they

are aligned with the greatest needs and

In addition to cost-effectiveness, districts should ensure priorities of the district. that clear guidelines are in place for how funds are You can learn more about A-ROI at: allocated, particularly for school site-based resources. https://iasbo.tools/gfoa-materials Allocation formulas, whether staff or dollars, should be well-documented, intuitive and widely communicated. Additional elements that should guide allocation formulas include using the most current enrollment information possible, connection back to district goals and strategies, and allowing for principal discretion, when possible. Clear allocation formulas not only ensure all school sites are treated fairly, but ensure that everyone knows how and why resources are being allocated. This also connects back to EBF and the focus on adequacy targets to help ensure district allocation formulas address district needs and fund key areas adequately.

GFOAs School Budgeting Framework

GFOA’s school budgeting framework provides specific guidance on funding allocations which can be found here: https://iasbo.tools/gfoa-allocate This is also supported by a case study and other resource available at: https://iasbo.tools/gfoa-beaverton

We Are All in This Together To help districts in making these budget and planning process improvements, GFOA formed the Alliance for Excellence in School Budgeting. The Alliance is a networking group for school district leadership teams to gather annually to discuss, learn and share with one another to improve their budget and planning processes in a number of areas, including those areas that EBF focuses on. The annual event has included a number of districts from Illinois and a diverse set of districts from other states across the country. Districts have found the event to bring focus and collaboration on tackling district challenges and helps foster connections with other districts working on tackling similar issues. For more information on the Alliance please see: https://www.gfoa.org/school-budgeting.

Even before the pandemic, the value of networking and collaborating with peers has always been readily apparent, both for professional growth and to support your school district. The current uncertainty surrounding how to best re-open schools and deal with pandemic-related budgetary pressures have only increased that need for learning from one another. The resources and networking that ASBO International, Illinois ASBO, GFOA and others have available can not only support your professional learning and ability to do your work and do it well — but also help support you in knowing that none of us are alone in facing these challenges. Fiscal First Aid

GFOA has also given additional consideration to the extraordinary times we are currently facing by producing a series on budget balancing and long-term planning in times of financial distress – Fiscal First Aid – www.gfoa.org/ffa. The 12-step process includes a host of recommendations and advice on addressing financial challenges that not only address shorter term fiscal impacts, but also prepares organizations to be more responsive and resilient to future crises. In addition, GFOA published an addendum to Fiscal First Aid that focuses on specific considerations for school districts in both the near term, as we continue to navigate and change direction in response to educating students amidst the pandemic, and the long term, as districts begin to face longer term financial pressures related to pandemic induced economic impacts

A copy of the report is available here: www.gfoa.org/materials/school-ffa

SCHOOL BUSINESS 101

What does your health services department look like and how has it changed in light of COVID-19?

Before COVID, we had already added an additional nurse so that our Health Services “ Department included one licensed nurse who serves as our Health Services Coordinator and one non-licensed RN at each of our two buildings. We also have a secretary in the nurse’s office at our larger building. With COVID, we have added six part-time health aides that work between the two buildings. The health aides are handling the more normal dayto-day nurse office activities while our nurses are handling the student contact tracing for COVID. Our Assistant Superintendent for Personnel is doing the contact tracing for employees."

STEFANIE CROIX, Dir./Business Services, Lockport Twp. HSD 205

Per IDPH, we have set up an isolation room in each school separate from the nurse’s office. Students that are suspected/exhibiting symptoms of COVID are put in this room until their parent/guardian picks them up. The room is then properly sanitized by the custodian. Please note, this room and student must be visible to staff at all times. As long as we can due to weather, we will leave the window open in these rooms too. Teachers are to call the nurses office prior to sending any student to the nurse; this is a change in normal procedures. We are also hiring nurse's aides to assist our nurses and to monitor student(s) in the isolation room."

LUANN KOLSTAD, Chief School Business Official, Park Ridge Niles CCSD 64

We designated one RN to be our “COVID coordinator” for our cooperative. Her pre-COVID workload was distributed among our other nurses so she can focus 100% on COVID. She provides COVID safety/PPE training for staff, N95 fit testing (for nurses and custodians only), supervises the mask exemption process for students and facilitates contact tracing.

Designating one person to be the point of contact has ensured consistent messaging and alleviated anxiety among staff. She is willing to work nights/ weekends which is essential for contact tracing. We are concerned that she will need additional support for contact tracing as we bring more students back, so we’re working with our other nurses to designate backup. All of our nurses are required to complete the free six-hour contact tracing course offered by John Hopkins University."

REILEY STRAUB, Dir./Business & Operations, North DuPage Special Ed. Co-Op (NDSEC)

navigating your way tHrougH a difficult conversation

Having a difficult conversation is just that…difficult. No one looks forward to having one, some do whatever it takes to avoid one, but when you work with people, difficult conversations are inevitable. It can take time to become adept at talking with staff and addressing behavior and other sensitive issues. When in doubt and/or depending on the severity of the situation, we consult our attorney for guidance and direction.

Here are some of tHe strategies tHat Have worked well for aptakisic-tripp scHool district 102:

know your role Facilitator, mediator, counselor or investigator? The reason for your meeting will help determine your role. We know we are not fixers; we know we cannot solve other people’s problems for them. However, we can provide support, suggest strategies and process through the situation together to find the best solution for all concerned. There may be times as the conversation flows that your role needs to change to keep things moving, and hopefully in a positive direction.