Crisis Budgeting 101: Finding hope amid chaos 

Popular wisdom holds that there’s a Chinese character for “opportunity” that combines the symbols for “crisis” and “danger.” The accuracy of the translation is in dispute, but there’s little question that it represents a philosophical search for a silver lining that has broad popular appeal—especially in dismal financial times like these, when public education and other vital services are in peril.

The urgency with which school board members and administrators are searching for solutions was evident throughout the California School Board Association’s Annual Education Conference and Trade Show in San Diego last December. In giant auditoriums, coffee shops and hallways, and during dozens of clinics and workshops, the talk overwhelmingly focused on grim economic forecasts and—more important—on finding strategies to preserve as many vital educational services as possible, even as the budget news from Sacramento continued to worsen.

“It’s weighing on us,” Jannelle Kubinec, associate vice president of School Services of California, Inc., said during a conference presentation on crisis budgeting that drew an overflow crowd.

“How do we make necessary decisions that are legal, professional and moral? We can’t do things the way we’ve always done them,” Kubinec said. “We’re already working harder and doing more with less. We can’t sustain this indefinitely. We have to do things differently. We have to do them smarter.”

Now is an especially critical time for school board members and administrators to learn from colleagues and from experts in school finance, classroom instruction, organization management and innovative budgeting strategies. But with school district and county office of education budgets stretched to the limits, it’s also hard for some educators to justify an investment in professional development—however valuable it proves to be.

“This was probably a difficult conference to come to,” Ventura Unified School District board member John Walker, CSBA director from Region 11, conceded at the event. “We’ve probably taken some heat for coming.”

To ensure that those who attended got what they needed, CSBA conference planners made sure that the program covered an array of topics directly related to creative budgeting and the preservation of essential educational services.

CSBA Executive Director Scott P. Plotkin said he heard from conference participants who were hungry for answers.

“A board member told me: ‘OK, OK, I get it. We have a problem,’ ” Plotkin recalled during the conference. “ ‘Now tell me what to do about it!’ That’s what we are trying to do here.”

In workshops, table talks and clinics, school board members, administrators and consultants described in detail what they’d tried “to do about it.”

Conference topics ran the gamut—from technical discussions about creative uses of categorical funds and school facilities to the merits of bringing in goats for some low-cost, environmentally friendly weed control.

Some sessions focused on finding flexible sources of state and federal funding, sharing staff and facilities with other districts or outside organizations, marshalling volunteers, or working effectively with employee unions. Others concentrated on auditing and reducing utility costs; operating energy-efficient campuses and services; and generating more “B.I.S.” (“butts in seats”) general fund revenue—and improving learning—by boosting attendance; establishing recycling programs, both to teach conservation and to raise money. There were even sessions devoted to cautionary tales of budgeting and revenue-generating strategies that had not worked as well as expected.

School board members and administrators who have shepherded their districts and county offices through horrific fiscal circumstances advised colleagues to identify their most essential services and set priorities that protect the programs that were most essential to student learning. Don’t start a budget process by focusing on what can be cut, experts urged; instead, identify what programs are most important and figure out how to protect them.

“Be proactive rather than reactive,” advised Kevin Gordon, president of the School Innovations and Advocacy consulting service. Gordon, a general session speaker who also moderated a workshop on “Surviving the School Fiscal Crash of 2009-10,” urged board members to hang tough when debating painful cuts.

“Don’t be intimidated by the crowd,” he said. “You must demonstrate leadership. Define and fund your top priorities. Generate revenues and focus on what to save.”

The Tahoe-Truckee Unified School District offered a case in point. School board members made a commitment to reducing the academic disparity between English language learners and native English speakers.

When the crisis first hit Tahoe-Truckee two years ago, district leaders asked an outside consultant to review their use of categorical funds. They called in all principals to evaluate site operations, visited other districts to study different ways of doing things and tried new educational models. The board had to make difficult cuts.

“We never lost focus on the achievement gap, and we stayed dedicated to closing it whenever we had to make decisions about the budget,” said Tahoe-Truckee board member Bev Ducey, a member of a workshop panel of fiscal “innovators” who had weathered tough budgetary times.

Tahoe-Truckee raised class sizes and laid off teachers—some of whom were later rehired to fill different roles in the district’s new educational model. Despite the hardships, Ducey said, the district has dramatically raised student achievement, and staff morale is good.

“Initially, some administrators were worried about losing ‘their’ money,” she said, but district staff members were able to put the collective needs of all students first—even if it meant painful cuts to their own campuses. “We got complete buy-in from our staff. The difference between now and two years ago is night and day,” Ducey said.

San Jose Unified School District Superintendent Don Iglesias said a “tough, veteran” school board has been key to his district’s success in dealing effectively with dismal budget years. A revenue formula was negotiated with teachers that generated raises in good years and provided sound rationales for reductions in bad times, putting labor and management on the same page.

“We were the first district to implement furloughs, and it was the teachers’ idea,” Iglesias said. “We were successful because of the collective leadership of the school board, administration and teachers.”

The district even took a creative approach when considering what to do with a fleet of aging buses. “We ran an ad on eBay,” Iglesias said. “I thought we might sell them to old baby boomers, but I didn’t have high hopes. We wound up generating half a million dollars in sales.”

Carol Brydolf (cbrydolf@csba.org) is a staff writer for California Schools.

Searching for answers

• Many of the speakers at CSBA’s 2009 Annual Conference and Trade Show provided downloadable versions of the handouts from their conference sessions, and many of those sessions dealt with budgeting strategies in hard times. Go to http://aec.csba.org and click on “Archived Conference Materials.”