Ever since I started working at a school district in 1991, there have been repeated cycles of discussion about aligning the budget to the strategic plan, board goals, or instructional outcomes. The account code structure was not designed for this task. California overhauled and standardized its codes about 15 years ago. It created an instructional goal that could be adapted to tie plans to budgets. However this field of the account string is defined by the state to show types of students and instructional settings. How would you adapt the goal field when more than one group of students or settings is served by a single plan item?
Most districts I know of use an optional field, often called a Program or Cost Center. This is the most likely place that districts will tie budgets to plans.
A former colleague re-defined this field and called it an SDP – Service Delivery Plan – based on a similar innovation at the City of Sunnyvale. The state Public Health Department’s Office of AIDS-HIV Care also uses something similar, and information can be found here.
Our attempt to create service delivery plans, budget them and measure outcomes died of neglect. Why? We said we had no time for this extra work, did not know what measures to implement, and rather suspected that a department would continue to exist and be funded even if it implemented the SDP poorly or not at all.
Now the Local Control Funding Formula requires that districts tie their budget to their accountability plans and there are consequences for not doing it. The days of “no time” and avoided consequences are over.
The new funding model requires districts to address eight state priorities:
Source: http://www.lao.ca.gov
The problem is that some of these items only vaguely relate to budget line items.
Say that a component of the school climate improvement plan is to overhaul the maintenance work order system and have maintenance teams be more responsive to site needs. Would a portion of the maintenance budget really be segregated out and coded as “school climate”?
Some would argue that site maintenance is foremost a safety issue. Agreed. It is both. How do you code one activity to two priorities simultaneously?
This is where we previously gave up. Underneath the “no time” excuse was really a more fundamental brick wall. It was the knowledge that any activity usually addresses several vital activities at once. How would I show that?
Nothing in life is just one thing. Everything is a microcosm of the whole.
I’d love to hear how others are tying their budgets to their accountability plans. By sharing ideas, something workable will emerge I am sure. Except, perhaps, if you have just one four digit optional field to work with.
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