The Haines Borough School District is changing how it budgets, aiming for greater transparency and accountability.
Under new superintendent Ginger Jewell, the district is moving to “zero-based budgeting,” using projections of actual costs, including estimates from teachers, to start building next year’s school budget now.
“It’s a much better way of budgeting in my opinion,” Jewell said, including by detecting inflated budgets and driving the district to find cost-effective ways to improve” Jewell said in an email. “It is based on needs rather than history.”
The changes come after board members, teachers and others expressed frustration with decisions made in the past year based on budget numbers they described as unclear.
Brenda Josephson, a tax accountant who spent three of the past four years as the school board’s treasurer, said the change is making more work for teachers and administrators up front, but it will provide a more accurate picture of district spending, and allow for better decisions by the board.
“We have unlimited needs and limited resources, so a budget is something that you have to manage (tightly)… When we have the budget, you should be able to drill down and say, ‘We have $32,000 for this purpose. What are those items?’” Josephson said in a recent interview.
The starting budget for the district last spring was based on a budget from 2013, a model Josephson called “historical-based budgeting.” At one committee meeting, school business manager Judy Erekson cut about $250,000 from the budget during a brief session. To Josephson, that was alarming.
“If (Erekson) can magically cut $250,000, just like that, what did the first numbers mean? It didn’t mean anything to me,” Josephson said. Part of the issue, she said, was that former superintendent Michael Byer, who had announced his resignation, had become disengaged, but there were other issues, including adjusting the budget for actual expenses during the year.
Longtime teacher Patty Brown said she was “perplexed” by the district’s previous method of budgeting, that she described as reactive instead of proactive.
“You’d find out money was being appropriated or decisions were being made shooting from the hip,” Brown said. She said “front-loading” the budget is making more work for teachers– which is a concern – but she thinks it will pay off. “I appreciate that (superintendent) Ginger (Jewell) is going to the source. (The budget) is understandable if we have a framework all along.”
Lisa Schwartz, who joined the school board a year ago, said she was surprised that the budgeting process at the school last year wasn’t as clear as it was at other community groups she has been involved in. “I want to understand the budget. More of a forward-looking budget style makes more sense to me, to know where our money is, and how much we have to spend, so we don’t overspend or underspend. Maybe the way (budgeting) was done worked on some level, but it didn’t work on others.”
As the school budget tightens, it’s critical for board members to have that information, Schwartz said. “To know if changes that we make are sustainable, we have to know what’s in the budget. If we spend it one place, we can’t spend it somewhere else.”