Superintendents Roles and Responsibility

After visiting with my site-supervisor and reading our assigned reading for the week, I have found that the budget process is probably the most important task that takes place within a school district.  I learned that for the budget and Superintendent to be effective the school board and the Superintendent must be on the same page when creating the budget. 

Mr. Driskell informed me that the most important part of getting started on the budget is to have a well thought out plan.  This plan must include the input from all stakeholders and program directors and allow them to have make suggestions and bring information to the table.  Once you get your input from all involved, he then suggested taking a look at the previous year budget and observes how things worked within it.  Making a comparison with the last year’s budget gives you a starting point and an idea of where to start the budgeting process.

 He then informed me to get an estimate of this upcoming year’s revenue and to also compare it to last year’s revenue to start to get a feel for how things will work out.  Other things to take into consideration are any new expenditures for the year and what additional revenue may come into play also.  It is critical to know the ADA for the next year and taking a good estimate is a very important in knowing and projecting revenue for the next year.  Mr. Driskell also told me that when working out the template to see what the revenue would be that it is important to have someone else work with you on this process and make a comparison on the projected revenue.  By having at least one other person run the template, it allows you to get two projections and in many cases you should use the lower one as your expected revenue.  While doing it this way you are allowing yourself some cushion in the budget and maybe some extra monies if they were needed.

Another thing that my site supervisor went into detail was on the different line items.  He would sit down and go through each one on the previous year and see how that line item came out.  If the item was in the black and there were no expectations of needing more money in the particular item, then we would fund the same amount.  Thus, creating a cushion within that item that in most cases could be forwarded to the fund balance the following year.  His advice was to be careful when doing it this way and insure that all areas of the budget were covered and not to leave any gaps in other program areas.

It seems that the best thing learned from this process is to have common sense, plan appropriately, be transparent with all stakeholders and communicate with those as well.  When these steps are followed and this process is done in the correct manner, then the budgetary process can be completed with success.  When a budget is successfully made with the best interest of the whole district in mind, then the students will always benefit.