Category Archives: Effective Resource Use/Strategic Budgeting

Allan Odden and Lawrence Picus have been retained by the Wyoming Legislative Service Office to work with the Legislature’s Select Committee on School Finance Recalibration to update the cost basis of all the elements of the state’s school finance formula. The current funding formula was based on an adequacy study the pair conducted for the state in 2005 and updated five years later during the state’s 2010 recalibration effort.

The work for the 2015 recalibration project draws from an Odden and Picus authored “Desk Audit” of the state’s school finance system that recommended recalibration of many components of the funding model. Odden and Picus met with the Committee on May 21 and 22 in Casper, Wyoming to launch this year’s recalibration effort.

Randy Poe, Superintendent of Boone County, Kentucky recently was recognized as the 2015 F.L. Dupree Outstanding Superintendent of the Year Award by the Kentucky School Board Association. Poe stated that Boone County has been very successful because it has been forced to look to evidence based finance to finance it operations and align everything to the instructional core.

The book on “Improving Student Learning When Budgets are Tight” is a valuable resource for all districts whether budgets are tight or not. It has been the major resource for our budget committee to establish priorities over time utilizing it as a guide.

Our district is funded $20 million less than the average school district in Kentucky based on per pupil spending for our size but our focus on the right priorities such as instructional coaches allows us to continue to improve academic gains.

Based on School Match.com we are in the lowest 10% for funding in the Nation but score in the top 60% in the Nation on academic performance. We truly believe we are that successful because of the Evidence-Based approach to school finance.

We discuss “strategic budgeting” more in two books:

• Allan Odden, 2012, Improving Student  Learning When Budgets are Tight, Thousand Oaks, CA.
• Allan Odden and Sarah Archibald, 2009,Doubling Student Performance … and finding the resources to do it, Thousand Oaks, CA .

In addition, our 2011 and 2012 articles in professional publications further discuss these issues:

•  Allan Odden and Lawrence O. Picus, 2011, Improving Teaching and Learning When Budgets are Tight.  Phi Delta Kappan, 93 (1), 42-48 .
• Allan Odden, September 2012, Can We Pay for Current Education Reform?  Principal Leadership.
• Allan Odden, 2011, Schools Can Still Improve.  Educational Leadership, 69(4), 14-15.

An earlier version of the findings about the use of the education dollar can be found in our 1995 Phi  Delta Kappan article that concluded that the traditional way education dollars are spent produce neither fiscal smoking guns nor fiscal academy awards .  This article drew on several years of study when the principals in our firm directed a national school finance center.  The 1995 annual yearbook of the Association for Finance and Policy summarized what we and others discovered about how education dollars are traditionally used.