A not-so-scientific barometer for gauging the issues facing California school districts is on the Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team webpage, . The FCMAT webpage scrapes education-related news from regional newspapers and publications originating all around California to give readers a quick glimpse of issues facing school districts. FCMAT also pushes out a daily email with these headlines if one registers for it on the FCMAT website. The articles on the FCMAT website generally revolve around the LCAP, equity, student safety and assessment. Without question, however, close to half of the headlines on any given day relate to fiscal matters. School district management is nothing but complex. Running schools involves navigating the various layers of people, community expectations, student welfare and safety, contracts, school boards, all bundled in a wrapper comprised of dollars. Each of these areas, if not navigated well, can make for some career-ending situations. Exacerbating these issues is the trepidation that many district administrators feel when having to understand how school business works. When it comes to managing fiscal distress in a school district, you hear the following from district leaders:

Each of these quips illustrates ignorance regarding managing district fiscal stability. In many cases, school administrators’ career progression through the ranks to district leadership bypasses programs for learning school fiscal management. Numerous school administration credential programs focus little on how dollars flow through school districts, and because of the complexity, school business is a subject that can’t be understood through a one-day seminar, or weekend program. For this reason, it is imperative for anyone who is a current or future district level administrator to consider enrolling in ACSA’s School Business Academy, or any of the California Association of School Business Officials Business Executive programs.   The ACSA and/or CASBO programs will not transform anyone into a CBO, but they will provide the foundation for which to understand how school business works. The ACSA School Business Academy conveys the secret that district fiscal solvency solely relies upon scale; when student attendance increases*, revenue increases, and the ability to serve students increases in proportion to the amount of new dollars generated by new students. The reverse is also true — when student attendance decreases*, the amount of dollars decreases, and the ability to serve students decreases in proportion to the lost attendance, and thus school leaders must scale down expenses to keep student services at the same level.  School administrators who have been through the ACSA School Business Academy understand how utilizing the Multi-Year Projection that is submitted to their county office three times a year is a tool for knowing when to scale up or scale down during the course of the following year’s budget development. Leaders in school business understand that scaling up or scaling down is not a Slimfast or liposuction quick fix, but rather a series of systemic changes that affects everyone and everything in the school district.  

Knowing the drivers for fiscal solvency and budget management provide any school administrator or policy maker the foundation for being able to understand and solve fiscal issues before they become catastrophic.  In this era of increasing pension liabilities, a potential recession and declining student enrollment, problem solving fiscal issues is going to be a new arena that every current or future school administrator will have to be comfortable navigating and understanding. Recognizing when to scale up or to scale down requires leadership and the ability to convey the fiscal complexities in a clear and articulate fashion.