Frontline Blog

In today’s K-12 landscape, school leaders face a host of challenges that seem to have only been exacerbated since the pandemic.

Executing a five-year financial projection can be a time consuming and complicated process — especially if you are starting the process for the first time. However, administrators that approach this type of project with a strategic perspective will understand that a financial projection is more than just a spreadsheet. A meaningful multi-year financial forecast can produce tremendous value for a school district — beyond the tables, charts, and graphs that are generated as output.

So, when a once-in-a-generation investment in education comes through the system, it behooves school leaders to consider how to achieve an equitable distribution of that investment.

Long-term planning has always been a key responsibility for school business officials. But in the wake of the pandemic, this planning has taken on not only a new level of importance, but also a new degree of complexity.

Bargaining in reaction to outdated and sometimes misleading information is extremely uncomfortable. The experience left its mark and underscored the importance of communicating our district’s “story” to all stakehold¬ers well before any negotiation sessions. That means presenting beyond “where are we now” to “where we expect to be” in a year, two years, and five years down the road based on current trends. It means not only using analytics but also finding a way to make their interpretation easily accessible to everyone.

Financial systems for school districts are great tools to accurately record revenue and expense transactions. But, as anyone who is charged with creating monthly reports can tell you, that’s where their ease of use ends. It typically takes hours — even days — of work to manually extract the right data and then build reports the district relies on to manage the health of the budget.