Category: Budget

Smarter Spending in School Divisions

11/11/2025

I love to beg, steal, or borrow great ideas from other school districts. Last year at the Virginia School Board Association's annual conference, I was really excited to learn about great budgeting practices from Albemarle County Public Schools.

Every school division would benefit from some version of these practices, and I believe other types of organizations can, too. Here are my top five takeaways:

1. Employee Voice: Albemarle created an Employee Budget Advisory group that includes two representatives from each school and central office department. This group discusses challenges that impede teaching and learning at their best, and they’re empowered to think about what resources would help alleviate those challenges. Members review budget options, weigh priorities, and offer ideas for cutting costs. Several of the reductions approved in the school division’s most recent annual operating budget came from this group.

2. Clear Goals and Outcomes (aka Logic Models): Anyone making a new budget request submits a form that includes clear identification of Inputs (initial, non-budgetary resources that must be invested to get started); Activities (first-year deliverables); Outputs (short-term results); and Outcomes (long-term, positive changes). Here’s an example that involves funding for specialized reading and math support.

Slide from Albemarle County Public Schools VSBA Presentation, 11/21/2024.

3. Accountability: The Superintendent and his leadership team conduct intentional, methodical follow up on investments they’ve made, using the logic models that were part of the budget requests. The owner(s) of each request meet with the Superintendent and the Assistant Superintendent for Strategic Planning each year to report on their progress. For relatively new requests, that might mean presenting information related to Inputs and Activities. Two years out, budget owners should be able to share data on Outputs. Three to five years after budget approval, budget owners need to share evidence of quantifiable, positive Outcomes.

4. Transparency: School division leaders use the reporting described above to make decisions about whether to continue, adjust, or abandon different initiatives. In each year’s published budget book, ACPS reports how previous investments are performing.

Slide from Albemarle County Public Schools VSBA Presentation, 11/21/2024.

5. Change Management: Albemarle recognizes that new policies, processes, and resources need to be implemented carefully. Its Budget Proposal Template includes this Change Management Matrix to encourage thoughtful execution:

March 2025 budget comments

4/28/2025

Last night, the School Board approved its FY26 Proposed Budget, which now goes through a period of public discussion and refinement before the board approves a final budget in May.

Below, I'm sharing the remarks I made at last night's meeting about our proposed budget and the process we've undertaken to develop it.

Later today, the School Board and the County Board will gather in a joint public work session to share and discuss each organization's FY26 proposed budget; I encourage you to watch via video stream or join us in the County Board Meeting Room at 1 pm.

I want to thank the Superintendent and members of his leadership team for their partnership and willingness to work together a little differently this year. In particular, I am grateful for the conscientious work of Andy Hawkins, Tameka Lovett-Miller, and John Mayo.

When we began our budget work in July, we knew we would have a considerable gap to cover. In the initial scenarios we looked at, the gap ranged from an estimated 35 million dollars on the low end, if we built in just a step increase for our employees with no cost of living adjustment, to 55 million dollars if we wanted to give a step and a 3% COLA.

We also knew we would not have reserves to plug that gap as we’d done in years past, nor did we want to keep using reserves, which are one-time money, to fund ongoing costs.

Back in the summer, we agreed we wanted to align our financial resources to our strategic plan and data about changing student needs. We wanted to free up resources for priorities and needs that are currently unfunded. We had the goal of ensuring that we can recruit and retain skilled, talented, and effective staff. And we wanted to do all of this in a way that would increase our financial stability and reduce our structural deficit.

These were our goals at the outset, which I hope you saw reflected in the budget direction the School Board approved last October.

In my School Board life, whenever we’re wrestling with a mighty problem, I like to remember that we are not the only school division in the universe. I ask myself, “What have other school divisions done when they faced similar problems?” So my work began with a lot of study of what other divisions have done to close budget gaps and realign resources. This study of other districts factored into our work over the summer, and it also is reflected in the analysis we commissioned from an outside company that has worked with many other school systems on issues just like ours.

Tonight in the budget presentation, you heard about things that are being proposed as potential reductions. What you didn’t hear about are the things that we did NOT include, and that we saw in other school divisions. I think this is useful context for what is being presented, so I want to talk just a bit about things we rejected, for a variety of reasons.

We did not increase class sizes, which is admittedly the easiest lever to pull when a school division wants to reduce costs. In our public meetings, we regularly hear from APS educators during public comment who talk about the impact of class size increases on their workload and their ability to know and support each one of their students.

We did not eliminate retiree health benefits as other divisions have done, because we know that these benefits are significant to our retirees, who devoted so many years to our community, and because we know they are an important reason why many educators choose to stay with APS.

We did not outsource and privatize parts of our operation like Extended Day, transportation, or custodial and maintenance services, as is the case in many other school divisions. These employees are members of our APS family and they form valuable relationships with our students, staff, and families that enrich our school communities. Many students begin and end their days with our bus drivers and Extended Day staff, who get to know them and provide positive support.

We did not scale back or eliminate our program for court-involved young people, or our program for older students that enables them to complete credits for a high school diploma while holding down one, and sometimes more than one, job.

We did not close a neighborhood school, which many school divisions have done as enrollment flatlines or decreases and the cost of building upkeep and renovation increases.

These are just a few of the measures that we determined weren’t a good idea for Arlington Public Schools.

There are other ideas we decided have promise, but will require more study and may take more than one year to implement. An example of this is converting more, or all, of our schools to renewable energy sources. At a net zero school like Discovery, this saves hundreds of thousands of dollars in utility costs each year.

I also want to say a few words about our process, which has been different this year in that the School Board and Superintendent are presenting this budget together. This year’s budget in my estimation required a different approach, where the board in its governance role and the Superintendent in his leadership and operational role had the opportunity for extended deliberation, discussion, and reflection.

Now we are bringing you the work we’ve done to date as a result of our deliberation, but our work is not done. The work sessions, hearing, and community engagement over the next several weeks are a crucial part of getting to the best possible result.

If you know anything about me from my time thus far on the board, I hope you know and trust my sincere belief that each of us has unique knowledge and perspective to share, and it’s only when we are genuinely curious and listening to each other that our own understanding and decision making can be enriched. You see things in your classrooms, in your homes and school communities, and in your team’s work here at Syphax, that I can’t see or know nearly as well as you do. When you share those ideas and considerations with me, I make better decisions.

It’s in that spirit of transparency and collaboration that we have posted, along with the proposed budget, a number of other documents that provide a window into our work to date. We’re showing you our work, and asking you to help us elaborate and improve it.

Finally, I want to note that in this particularly difficult budget season, and at a time of economic and job uncertainty for many in our community, we are necessarily having to make decisions that have a very human impact on many people. I want to say to those of you directly impacted by the proposed reductions that I am aware this is difficult and emotional. For me, that’s why it’s even more important that we use the time between now and May to be absolutely sure that we are making the most careful and strategic decisions possible. I thank all of you in advance for the contributions I know you will make.

We are all investors

5/10/2024

It was time for a new elementary math curriculum in Traverse City, Michigan, and the school district decided to take a pretty unconventional approach to making its selection.

This is no small matter, as purchasing curricula (including print or digital textbooks, workbooks, and other components) can cost millions of dollars, and districts typically only make this investment every five to ten years.

In Traverse City, the curriculum adoption committee had narrowed it down to three new curricula, each of which was backed by research. But here’s where things get interesting: the district then decided to run a year-long pilot study of all three curricula and include a control group of students who would continue to use the existing materials. Principals, teachers, and district leaders ran the pilot together.

At the end of the year, they found that only two of the curricula produced statistically significant improvements. They could then compare the financial costs of the two products, and they had practical wisdom from teachers who had implemented each product in the classroom to inform the decision about which product to select, what components to purchase, and how to roll it out to the rest of the district.

The associate superintendent overseeing math instruction called it “the best experience of my career.” One school board member shared, “For the first time in my board tenure, I feel that decisions have been rooted in objective information.”

This is one example of Academic Return On Investment (A-ROI), a collection of practices that many school districts are adopting to make more strategic decisions about how to invest their funds and how to evaluate the impact of their programs.

The ABCs of A-ROI

I’ve been learning about A-ROI from sources including the Government Finance Officers Association, the District Management Group, and Education Resource Strategies.

The question at the heart of A-ROI is: What does the most good, for whom, and at what cost?

Districts are using A-ROI to adopt new programs and initiatives, like in the math curriculum example shared above. Often, they run limited pilots before they scale implementation across a whole district.

Districts also use A-ROI to evaluate the return on investments they’ve already made, ensuring that existing initiatives are worth the time, money, and effort being expended.

Because staffing comprises the largest part of any school district’s budget, it’s important to capture the amount of staff time a particular program or initiative requires, as part of its overall cost; this is challenging, but not impossible, to do. There are formulas, tools, and templates available from districts that have already begun this journey.

That said, because A-ROI is intense, districts can’t analyze everything. Often, they choose to focus on the programs that consume the most resources, or where they’ve identified that a number of programs overlap and there might be redundancy.

The “Ugly Christmas Tree” in Boulder Valley, Colorado

A few years ago, Boulder Valley School District was struggling with the same problem that a lot of school districts face: in a well-intentioned effort to support as many students as possible, it had layered one initiative on top of another, creating what one former district leader calls “the ugly Christmas tree” effect: “too many decorations that, while individually well-intended, don’t work well together and weigh down the very thing they were intended to support.”

An initiative inventory confirmed some suspicions: school staff were trying to implement 251 initiatives from 28 teams across nine departments in the central office. Over the next six months, the district worked to glean as much information as it could about

the students served by each program
its known outcomes
its fully loaded costs, including allocation of staff time
and its connection to other efforts.

In parallel, through a survey of school principals district leaders gauged their perceived value of each program, and for which students. They also asked principals about the implementation status of each program, and whether additional support was needed to implement it effectively.

This didn’t instantly fix the problem—but it gave Boulder Valley a good place to start. The district is using this inventory to create a roadmap for when and how it will conduct more thorough analyses of specific initiatives as a regular part of its ongoing operation.

Five Tips I’ve Learned From Districts Who’ve Done It

1. Be clear at the outset about what “success” looks like. When a new initiative is proposed, specify the outcomes that will be measured, by whom, and when. Make sure everyone knows what data would be considered proof of success later on.

2. Combine evidence-based decision making with cost-benefit analysis. Evidence-based decision making says “Wow! This program delivers great results!” Cost-benefit analysis says, “Yeah, but it costs sixty gazillion dollars per student. What if we could get 70% of that same benefit with a program that costs a little less, and allows us to work on this other instructional need, too?”

3. Don’t be afraid of pilot tests. I’ve said in a school board meeting, “We can’t run pilot tests” and here is where I eat my words. We can and probably should. It’s the best way to reduce the risk of a district spending too much of its money and students’ and teachers’ time on an intervention that doesn’t work.

4. Beware the sunk cost fallacy. Only the likely future benefits and costs of a program—not the sunk costs—should be considered when making a decision on whether to invest in a program going forward. I think of this as the “bad boyfriend” cognitive bias. Yeah, you’ve been with him for four years. You’ve invested a lot of effort. But girl, it’s still time to go.

5. Don’t make it just about cutting costs. A-ROI might yield budget savings, but it’s ultimately about making the best instructional decisions for the district’s students. As such, it’s a process a district should run completely separately from its budget development cycle. Some districts also adopt formal policies stating that no employee will lose their job as a result of the findings of an A-ROI analysis. That analysis can lead to any one of the following results:

Wow. Great value. Let’s expand this program.
Delivering really well for some student populations: let’s use it in more targeted ways.
Results aren’t clear: let’s continue to monitor for X period of time.
We’ve uncovered this flaw: let’s fix that flaw and reevaluate in X period of time.
Let’s abandon this program.

In my work as a school board member, I can appreciate how intensive A-ROI would be to implement. But I am triply certain that A-ROI or a discipline very much like it is absolutely essential. We have to exercise this discipline if we are to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars, if we want to avoid overburdening educators with low- or no-value initiatives, and—most important—if we are really committed to providing the best education to our communities’ youngest citizens.

Building a school system budget: the basics, and the basic problem

3/2/2024

On Thursday, Dr. Duran presented his FY25 proposed budget to the School Board and the community. At present, there is a $29 million budget shortfall that we will need to close before the final budget is approved in May. Additional revenue may be coming from the County (per an advertised tax rate increase) and Virginia (as the General Assembly works to finalize the state budget); however, even with additional revenue, the School Board will have to find additional cost savings.

Below are the remarks I shared at Thursday's meeting. I invite your participation in our budget process this spring and thank you in advance for your questions and ideas.

One of the things I have learned in my first two years on the school board is that it can be tempting to receive the budget and immediately jump into its specifics—in essence, the problem of not seeing the forest for the trees. There will be time in the weeks ahead to dig in, question, and scrutinize the details. Tonight, though, I believe it’s important that we intentionally spend some time talking about the larger, structural elements that we’re seeing in this budget.

The first element is revenue. I have spoken before about my concern that we do not operate in a world where we can be completely confident that revenue growth will exceed the growth in our expenses. I have spoken about my concern that we cannot rely forever on using reserves to plug the gap in our budget and fund ongoing costs. Over the past few years, we’ve used reserves in large measure to fund a compensation increase that was several years overdue for our staff. This is an ongoing cost if we are to fairly compensate our employees for their work and recruit new people who want to work in Arlington.

Since I have been on the board, and even during the years before, I have heard various people bristle at the claim that APS has a “structural deficit.” In fact, we do. Our share of local tax revenue, our funding from the state, the very small amount we get from the federal government, fees we collect from programs like Extended Day and our pools—these revenues do not cover ongoing expenses. Our Budget Advisory Council has expressed this concern multiple times, and I am grateful for the volunteer energy and ideas that group brings to this challenge.

Other local school divisions acknowledge the revenue issue as well. Fairfax County Public Schools states: “A structurally balanced budget occurs when recurring revenues are equal to recurring expenditures in the adopted budget. Since FCPS has needed to use one-time savings from the prior fiscal year to meet recurring expenditures, FCPS has a structural deficit. While this helps address funding needs in the short term, FCPS and the County both recognize that using one-time funding for recurring expenditures is not fiscally sound over the long term.”

In Loudoun County, the school division notes “Since the current state funding methodology significantly underfunds the true cost of the mandated minimum instructional program, each school division in the state uses a greater share of its local revenues to cover the costs of education.”

In Loudoun last year, the local government funded 69% of the school division’s operating budget, and the state funded 29%. That left just 2% to be covered by other sources, including federal funding. In Fairfax, 69% was funded locally and 27% was funded by the state. In Arlington, our FY24 school operating budget is 78% locally funded and 15% supported by state funds—leaving a larger gap, of 7%, to be covered by federal dollars, fees we can collect, and reserves. $38M in reserves that we used to plug the expense gap and balance our budget. (See breakdown of funding for local school divisions here.)

This brings me to the second structural element, which is expenses. If you don’t have the revenue you’d like to have—whether that’s in your family, in your company, for your faith community—you look to cut expenses. Some will naturally wonder why expenses and enrollment don’t track at the exact same rate in a school division. I have two things to say about this.

The first thing I’d encourage us to acknowledge: our schools, not just in Arlington but across the country, are being asked to do more and more. First and foremost, we expect our schools to modernize and personalize instruction according to what research is telling us about the science of reading, necessary supports for English Learners, the most effective accommodations for students with disabilities, and more. We expect our schools to operate in an environmentally sustainable way to mitigate the climate crisis, which is both a practical measure and a moral obligation to our youngest citizens. We expect our schools to be the first responders to students with mental health needs—which our local and national data show are escalating. We expect our schools to educate students about drugs that are more addictive, lethal, and accessible than anything previous generations had to reckon with. And at the most basic level, we expect our schools to be safe places, in an era of all-too-common school shootings.

Even if enrollment held steady over the past ten years—and even building in market-competitive salaries for our staff—due to the factors I’ve just described and more, our financial needs would increase.

The second thing I will say about expenses is this: we absolutely must be getting the maximum value for every dollar we spend. I have spoken before about our need to have a more intentional process for evaluating return on investment. This is true in all times, not just in times when we are revenue-challenged, because we are stewards of a significant amount of public money and trust.

None of what I have stated tonight absolves us of our responsibility to operate as strategically and efficiently as possible, and in a way that aligns with our values and priorities. And while I hope we will continue to talk about our budget in this high-level, structural way, the immediate work before us is to balance our budget. We have to do that in a manner that invests in the most high-leverage, critical components of our work—even as society’s definition of our work is expanding.

To do that, we need to leverage all the expertise at our disposal, and I believe many individuals and groups have expertise to contribute.

Families, you know better than anyone how high-level budget and operations changes will affect the real day-to-day of your children and your home.

Our school staff contribute their practical, on-the-ground experience to say, “Here’s how policies and investments actually impact our direct work with students.”

Our central office staff look across schools to understand trends, meet shared needs, and apply research and best practices from the field.

The superintendent applies his expertise to say, “Here are my recommendations about the best ways to invest to meet our strategic goals.”

Our County Board colleagues hold the expertise to understand how APS’s needs align and coexist with other community needs, and within our shared, long term revenue forecast.

It is my belief that the School Board makes its best decisions when we listen carefully to the expertise each of these groups can contribute and synthesize these perspectives into a fuller, more informed understanding to guide decision making. I look forward to doing that work together.

Smarter Spending in School Divisions

March 2025 budget comments

We are all investors

Building a school system budget: the basics, and the basic problem

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