How Wauwatosa’s CFO Turns Staffing Ratios Into Better Board Conversations

If you’ve ever driven to Miller Park — American Family Field, if we’re being current — to watch the Brewers play, you’ve been to Wauwatosa. It’s the first-ring Milwaukee suburb where Scot Ecker has served as Chief Finance and Operations Officer for a little over two years, since he arrived in July 2024. Frontline’s Analytics team invited him to speak during an August webinar. During the session, they presented a brand-new staffing ratios dashboard inside their Comparative Analytics solution, to capture his live reaction. Ecker didn’t hold back. His first reaction: he wished it had existed when he started.

That’s a meaningful admission from someone who spent his first year leaning hard into data just to get his school board on the same page.

What the Staffing Ratios Dashboard Does 

Frontline’s Comparative Analytics solution helps districts benchmark their operations against peers on enrollment trends, spending patterns, staffing levels and a host of other characteristics. The new Staffing Ratios dashboard takes one piece of that and makes it visual: the relationship between students and teaching staff, and students and support staff, broken down by building level (elementary, middle, high school). It shows year-over-year trends, helping leaders spot whether they’re adding support positions, where those positions are concentrated, and how their ratios compare to similar districts. No spreadsheets. No rebuilding the same analysis every time someone asks. Just a clean, consistent one-page view that’s ready to present—to a board, a community, a PTA—the same way every year.

For a CFO who arrived mid-crisis, that consistency matters. So does the ability to answer a question without starting from scratch.

“One of the things I did when I got here was really lean into data for our school board and trying to present that in a way that they would understand. This would have saved me a ton of time and research.”

– Scot Ecker, CFO, Wauwatosa Public Schools

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Staffing Ratios dashboard from Comparative Analytics, showing Wauwatosa’s five-year trend in student-to-teacher and student-to-support-staff ratios. 

Two years in, the dashboard serves a different purpose for him now. He no longer relies on data to get oriented. Now, he’s using it confirm his hunches and give him language to explain it to people who weren’t in the room when the decisions were made.

The ESSER Cliff, and the Bond That Followed

One of the clearer stories in the data is about the district’s non-teaching staff. Wauwatosa’s staffing ratios dashboard shows the ratio of students to non-teaching staff falling from 19.2 in 2021 to 15.5 today, a steeper drop than the district’s student-to-teacher ratio saw over the same stretch (14.1 down to 12.8). Part of that shift traces back to a decision made before Ecker arrived: the district used ESSER funds to hire additional student support staff, and discovered, somewhat by accident, that those hires reduced discipline and attendance issues. When the temporary relief funding ran out, as it does for every district eventually, the board wanted to keep the positions anyway. Wauwatosa went to a bond specifically to fund them, and the community approved it.  

“The community approving the bond was a direct result of them being happy with the results of the additional staff,” Ecker said. Seeing that trend laid out in a single chart, rather than reconstructed from memory or a spreadsheet, is exactly the kind of thing he says he’d want in front of his board every year.

– Scot Ecker, CFO, Wauwatosa Public Schools

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The True Cost of the Neighborhood School 

Ecker also pointed to a harder, more local conversation the dashboard could help him have: what to do with Wauwatosa’s small neighborhood elementary schools, a long tradition in a community that’s nearly 120 years old. They’re a point of real community pride and, by his own admission, one of the least efficient ways to run an elementary program.

“Hardly any parents want  to see their child’s elementary school close, and those who don’t have a child in school tend to think that closing a school creates enough money that all budget disappear.”

– Scot Ecker, CFO, Wauwatosa Public Schools

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Rather than avoid that tension, Ecker uses ratio and cost data to show his community the true costs to keep every building open. “We know that you want all of these schools,” he said, describing the conversation he has when the district needs more money, “but this is the true cost to maintain them.” It’s less about winning an argument and more about giving people the information to weigh a tradeoff they already care about. 

One Dashboard, Several Audiences 

What struck Ecker most, viewing the dashboard for the first time, wasn’t a chart at all — it was the small information icon in the corner that spells out exactly what counts as “teacher” or “non-teaching staff” in his state. “Having that right there so people aren’t arguing about the data” matters, he said, because “I’d rather have them focus on what the data is telling us than where it came from.” He also liked that the dashboard stops at the building level — elementary, middle, high school — rather than listing every school by name, calling it a starting point that points toward deeper visuals without overwhelming a first look. Ecker sees a single one-page view like this doing double or triple duty: an annual staple for his board presentation, a recurring update for his PTA, even a recruiting tool on the district’s HR website. The appeal isn’t the visual by itself — it’s that it arrives built, stays consistent year over year, and doesn’t require his team to rebuild the analysis or pull fresh numbers from the state education department every time someone asks a question. 

Ecker was reacting to a dashboard that wasn’t even live in his account yet, which makes his read on it a useful gut check on what the tool is actually for. A leader two years into the job walked away with the confidence to tell his board that a strategic plan is working, and by his own account, that same one-pager would have spared him a chunk of research back when he was still getting his footing. That’s the range this kind of data has to cover: useful to someone brand new to the seat, and just as useful to someone who’s been there long enough to already know the answer.