Comments on: At long last, OUSD hires new budget director

By: turner

turner — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 15:30:16 +0000

A normal school district allocates money to its schools based on student enrollment, and the expenses the schools will incur that year. The budget is expense-driven.

Instead, OUSD uses RBB. They take into account current enrollment, historical enrollment, size of school and numerous other criteria. Then the schools are allocated their revenue. The RBB budget is revenue-driven.

At the same time RBB was introduced, there was an effort to restructure central office personnel. Their aim was to convert district services to revenue generating operations.

RBB’s goal is to give the OUSD schools the flexibility to choose services they wanted to use. They would have the option to purchase district services. The district non-academic operations would have to compete to provide services and generate revenue. This is the service economy.
The investment framework is the structure (rules, policies, procedures) that would enable the service economy to be successful.

It is a good idea…in theory. Central Office operations would rely less on general fund dollars and their services to the schools would be improved greatly. And, the schools would have more oversight on, and authority in, their expenditure.

turner

By: Charley Cowens

Charley Cowens — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 06:44:33 +0000

Katy, sounds like a story. Anything related to school finance is complicated, but the basic principles of RBB are pretty clear: have the site make the trade-offs for expenditures within the resources due to the site from its enrollment. One of the key features Barak discussed in a presentation to our budget advisory committee in WCCUSD was a special internal software application to make it easier for site administrators to work with RBB. I suspect the success of RBB is based a great a deal on how successful this software has been.

Finally, I still wait for someone to take a stab at explaining “the District’s investment framework and service economy”.

Charley

By: Katy Murphy

Katy Murphy — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:05:24 +0000

Charley: You mean Results-Based Budgeting (RBB), right? Any major changes to that policy would likely come from the top.

Because RBB is so complex, though, I wonder how well it is functioning in Barak’s — and former CFO Javetta Robinson’s — absence.

By: Charley Cowens

Charley Cowens — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 05:34:50 +0000

What exactly does the phrase, “the District’s investment framework and service economy,” mean? To me, Barak was a supporter of Randy Ward’s site-based budgeting system. (I forgot the brand name.) What does the arrival of this guy mean for this budgeting system?

Charley

By: district employee

district employee — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 03:30:28 +0000

This is the introduction that was sent to most of the executive directors and then (in most cases) passed through departments. “All” is definitely appropriate.