You might have seen over on the (soul) Patch.com or insidenova.com that the School Board has passed a resolution rejecting the City Council's "categorized" budget. You might wonder what the heck that means and why it is important. I suppose that you might also not wonder about it. It's a bit of an arcane corner of the world but for those of you that are interested, here ye are:
The City Council is allowed to budget money for the schools in two methods: the first is a lump sum allocation that simply says "here's your money, do your best with our precious tax dollars". The second method is the categorized budget where funds are allocated by what the state calls "Major Categories" (a phrase certainly hammered out in some crazy committee meeting where "Major Categories" was suggested early in the morning but it took the balance of hate day to arrive at the same phrase). Major Categories would be transportation, instruction, administration and on and on.
This year, for the first time ever, the Council allocated the school board budget by major categories. This was done for several reasons not the least of which was concern that the School Board would unilaterally take some of that money and buy an administration building. There isn't all that much support on Council yet for such a move. Subsequent to the Council's action, I received a letter from the School Board indicating that they object to this method of allocation. They cite several reasons with the most important one being that if they want to move money from one category to another during the course of the year, they'll have to come to Council in order to do so. This could happen with some frequency.
They have asked the Council to reconsider this action. For my part, I didn't realize that this would be a consequence of our action and don't view this as a positive development. I share everyone's frustration with the performance of our schools – it's our biggest problem. However, I'm not sure I believe that managing the schools finances for them, however satisfying that might be, makes the division perform better. It occurs to me that if you want an organization to perform better, you need better leaders, not more accountants. Hopefully between the election and a new superitendant, we'll get that demand for excellence. I believe we've seen the beginnings of that in the changes the board made to their operations during the course of this budget.
