Smarter Budgets, Smarter Technology
Smart implementation of technology will give you returns in both lowered costs and higher yield. Experiencing thirty years of managing technology budgets and finding ways to maximize impact is one way to learn how to do this. Reading books such as Nathan Levenson (Smarter Budgets, Smarter Schools) and Allan Odden (Improving Student Learning when Budgets are Tight) is another approach. In either case, there are some basic concepts to consider as you are planning.
How do you define student learning? At a district leadership retreat, a review across all administrative departments counted up 90 separate initiatives. When asked which were high, medium, and low impact for student learning, 88 came back as high impact. When asked “How do you know?”, there were no systematic processes or answers. Find some….NCES has national measures; some are direct (NAEP), others are indirect (discipline, home access to technology)....choose some to use to measure the effectiveness of the work in your school.
Here are some examples of measurements you can use to compare the resource allocation to the effectiveness of the work.
Technology-based (computer/student ratio, computer/support cost per year, overall costs for technology as % of total budget)
Student Core Curriculum Net Instructional Time (hours/school year in class, attendance and disciplinary impact on time, absences v. time of year)
Faculty Instructional Time (net cost/hour, cost/student hour)
Equity factoring (ELL factor, FRL factor, Secondary school factor)
Per Pupil Costs by Function and Subfunction (cost/student hour, cost/year)
Administrative Cost (cost/student hour)
Support Services (custodian/sq.ft.)
Infrastructure costs (capital replacement costs/sq.ft, capital cost/assessed value of building)
Consider ways to maximize the impact of your resources. What are the accelerators (derivatives), those items that don’t just increase change, they increase the rate of change. One example is bandwidth…..the cost of bandwidth per unit is decreasing, the amount of information transferred per unit time increases with more bandwidth, and the number of learning opportunities for students increases with more bandwidth. For each additional dollar spent on bandwidth, the resource impact may be several times greater.
Consider ways to maximize the value of your most expensive resources. Your professional staff is generally 60-75% of your annual budget -- and their expertise is critical in your operation. Professional development is a valuable investment in their time, and not having a sustained and focused approach, or too many initiatives, may result in low effectiveness compared to the resource cost.
Consider costs of non-instructional tasks. There is often cost-shifting to professional personnel for a variety of reasons. Whether they are managing students in a non-instructional setting or managing devices in a classroom, weigh the convenience of the assignment against the educational value provided to the students. A professional working 10% of contracted time, or about 4 hours per week, costs the same as 10 hours per week for a para earning a livable wage.
Consider ways to maximize student learning time. The average per pupil spending in Vermont is over $18,000, or $100 per day. A cancelled class is a loss in value of $4000 for typical high school class size and course load. Disciplinary actions that put students in non-educational settings have additional costs beyond the $100 per day, as resources to help those students will need to be added someplace (homework help, parent meetings, etc.).
For specific ideas and examples of how this approach can help you maximize the budget value, check out other essays on this site.