Ask ten school finance leaders what it means for a school (network or system) to be “financially healthy,” and you’ll get ten different answers.
Some will mention cash reserves. Others will point to a balanced budget, the absence of a deficit, or a recent strong audit. All of those answers are accurate. None of them are complete.
Financial health is not a single number. It is not a ratio. It is not a year-end report the board reviews once. It is a system — the interlocking conditions that decide whether a school can keep its promises to the students in the building today, and to the communities counting on the building being there tomorrow.
When we treat financial health as a checklist, we end up solving the wrong problems. We cut when we should redesign. We react when we should plan. We manage budgets when we should be connecting financial reality to academic ambition.
After 15 years partnering with school leaders across 40+ states, we believe there are five foundations that produce financially healthy schools.
Financial health rests on: operations, governance, alignment, sustainability, and resiliency.
They aren’t a checklist. They have an order.
Operations and governance are the enabling conditions — what makes everything else possible. Alignment, sustainability, and resiliency are the outcomes — what a financially healthy school actually produces.
You cannot get the outcomes without the enabling conditions underneath them. And strong enabling conditions are wasted without the outcomes they’re meant to produce.
The rest of this piece makes the case for that structure, walks through each of the five, and offers a way to tell where your own organization is strongest and where it needs attention.
The Enabling Conditions: Why Operations and Governance Come First
A school can have a clear academic strategy (Alignment), a long-term financial plan (Sustainability), and thoughtful contingency thinking (Resiliency). If it cannot make disciplined resource decisions at the board level, close its books on time, or monitor cash, none of those strengths translate into the financial health needed to serve students well.
Governance is the decision-making structure.
It’s the board, the finance committee, the cadence and culture that shape how decisions actually get made. When financial governance is weak, good information goes unused. Meetings fill up with reports instead of strategy and foresight. The finance committee stays in the present. Hard questions get deferred because nobody has built the muscle to ask them.
Operations is the plumbing.
It’s the chart of accounts, the close process, the reporting that shows up on time and tells the truth. When operations is weak, finance leaders spend their energy reconstructing what already happened instead of planning for what’s next. Boards get numbers they can’t trust. Decisions get made on instinct or not at all because the data isn’t there.
Starting with operations and governance is practical.
Every financial decision a school makes — what to fund, what to stop, when to grow, when to hold — relies on timely and accurate information. If the numbers the board is looking at are three months old, the decision is a guess. If the finance committee has never debated a tradeoff, the decision is weakly connected to strategy.
Alignment, sustainability, and resiliency are outcomes that support mission, and they’re produced by the quality of the decisions a school makes over and over again. Operations and governance are what raise the ceiling on that decision quality.
The Outcomes: What Financial Health Actually Produces
With operations and governance in place, a school can start producing the outcomes that financial health is really about.
Alignment is whether the budget reflects the mission and priorities.
It’s the evidence that dollars are flowing toward what the school says it values. A strategic plan that doesn’t show up in the budget is closer to a wish list than a plan. Alignment is where finance stops being a separate conversation from academics and starts being the same conversation.
Sustainability asks whether the model works over time.
It’s the honest answer to whether the school’s plan is affordable when the assumptions stop being overly optimistic. A staffing plan that only works at full enrollment isn’t sustainable. Sustainability is what you have when the model holds up without requiring everything to go right.
Resiliency is whether the school can absorb a shock without losing its footing.
When something goes wrong, do you act strategically or react? If enrollment drops 8% next fall, does the school have the cash, the scenario plans, and the decision-making structure to respond with clarity? Or does it scramble?
The three outcomes matter differently depending on where a school sits:
A school facing financial volatility has to prioritize resiliency.
A school that’s functioning but structurally strained has to focus on sustainability, often using alignment as the tool for deciding what to change or stop doing.
A school with room to plan and invest can pursue alignment more fully, directing resources toward mission rather than reacting to constraints.
No school gets to focus on just one of these. All three matter.
But which one a school needs to lean on hardest depends on the conditions in front of it, and those conditions keep changing. Strong operations and governance are what allow a school to see the conditions clearly, and respond to them with more than instinct.
Hopefully This Provides a Useful Place to Start
A framework like this one is only worth your time if it helps a school answer a real question:
“Where are we strongest? Where are we weakest? What would it take to close the gap?
Every school finance leader has lived some version of these moments:
Revenue is flat or declining.
Enrollment is unstable.
Costs are rising.
Academic outcomes are lagging.
The strategic plan says one thing, but your budget says another.
A well-intentioned leader is asking for additional positions, but there’s no budget to support it.
In the face of these pressures, finance leaders often draw on what they’ve done in the past. Anchoring in prior budgets, adjusting where needed, and safeguarding key priorities. These instincts are grounded in experience and have sometimes served organizations well.
But today’s environment increasingly demands a more deliberate approach. One that moves beyond incremental change toward a strategic process that produces decisions your team is prepared to stand behind and carry forward.
As one finance leader we’ve worked with said, “We’ve never translated our budget, or the process to get there, in ways that our instructional priorities are fully vetted and seen.”
“Right answers” are particularly challenging to find in constrained times. The role of the finance leader is to design a process that produces those strong answers consistently, grounded in evidence, connected to strategy, with visible tradeoffs that talked about.
This piece advocates that finance leader role is most effective when it is moving beyond the budget manager and strategic forecaster roles. And into the role that leads and shapes a cross-functional process. One that surfaces, evaluates, and chooses investment options most aligned to academic and financial goals.
That’s what Preserving the Core is all about: a five-phase process for making school system budget decisions that connect financial reality to academic ambition, especially in a time of constraint. (The full slides to the original presentation can be found here)
Phase 1: Diagnose Gaps & Define Targets
Before generating options, agree with your executive team on what “success” really means. Start by naming two things most budget-only processes skip:
Academic Targets. Identify who you’re trying to reach, what outcomes you’re after, and by when.
Financial Goals. Define the conditions (e.g. cash position, margin, enrollment assumptions) that need to be true over a three-year window.
Together, these form a dual target statement. Something like:
“We are building a budget that achieves _____ academic outcomes within _____ financial conditions over a 3-year sustainability window.”
If you don’t start here, everything downstream is disconnected from strategy. A robust strategic plan is a great asset, especially if someone translates it to language that a budget can be evaluated against.
Phase 2: Define Rules & Roles
Before you crunch any numbers, establish how decisions will be made internally. This step keeps the focus most aligned to strategy, evidence, and obligations. Three things to lock in early:
Decision criteria. What are the 4-5 factors that every option will be evaluated against? Ours typically include how it advances academic targets, feasibility within financial guardrails (even at -5% enrollment), quality of supporting evidence, and positive/negative impacts to students and stakeholders.
Fixed vs. Flexible. Specifically name what is known to be off-limits and what is viable to change.
Who decides. Who generates options? Who evaluates? Who makes the final call? Clarify roles before pressure gets real.
Build the decision-making process before any pressure builds. When hard tradeoffs surface, leadership can evaluate options against shared criteria.
Be deliberate on roles from centralized to decentralized (school level autonomy). And help to surface what feels fixed but is actually flexible.
None of this is easy to implement.
Budgets carry institutional memory, political weight, and often trade-offs that feel unfair. Asking a team to change how they make decisions, not just what they decide, is slower and more uncomfortable than most leaders expect. But the alternative is a process that produces a budget that nobody truly understands and does not reflect the best and highest use of dollars.
Phase 3: Widen & Test the Options
The most common budget move in times of constraint is generating one type of option: cuts. But cutting is one of several moves you could make. Widening the options is one of the most critical roles of the finance leader in this process.
Push beyond the line items “salaries” and “services” and get underneath the budget to remind folks where the money is going. Structural design components that drive costs like master scheduling, compensation policy, special education service delivery, and school boundaries and footprints. Revenue enhancement possibilities like community partnerships, grant seeking, and enrollment marketing.
You can:
Reduce. Lower cost with the same delivery method (e.g. reduce central office FTE by X%)
Redesign. Same goal with a different model (e.g. redesigning a master schedule before adding an FTE).
Reallocate. Shift dollars from a lower-impact area to a higher one (e.g. APs vs instructional coaches; central office academic support vs. high dosage tutoring)
Adjust Revenue. Broaden the conversation beyond expenses to include revenue-centered topics like enrollment strategy, philanthropy, or new partnerships.
Phase. Change the timing or commitment level vs. completely eliminating something.
Wherever cuts might be applied, consider applying 2-4 options from above and test them against criteria your team agreed to in Phase 2.
Phase 4: Make Tradeoffs Visible
This phase requires intentional communication – very different than communicating the numbers in the budget. Your school system team spends weeks building options, testing assumptions, and debating tradeoffs… and then at some point will be presenting to the board or leadership team with a budget for approval.
All the good stuff that strengthened the decision hides beneath and within.
So flip it.
Present the academic targets and the financial guardrails that were socialized at the beginning – bust the amnesia on that and remind everyone where we agreed to head. Show the criteria your team used. The options you considered. The assumptions you tested. And the results, including what you gain, what you give up, and who is affected.
As one school leader told us, “Leadership is still trying to rely on legislative change rather than actually owning cost-benefit analysis.”
Own it. Show your work. Don’t just present your final answer, but the messy middle and process that helped you land your answer.
Phase 5: Implementation Discipline
A spring budget decision means little if it’s not being implemented with discipline in the fall.
Before the budget is finalized, identify 3-5 leading KPIs (academic and financial) that inform whether the plan is actually delivering. Proactively define how different results (e.g. -3% enrollment in Sept vs. -7% enrollment in Feb) might trigger immediate action vs. “being flagged for next year.” Schedule a mid-year review that leaves margin to adjust by year-end. Keep all your investment choices and trade off considerations together for the future. Over years, you will build a comprehensive view of both investments and options and an understanding of what works in what circumstances over time.
The Process Is The Point
We run our school systems with the belief that kids deserve better. In constrained financial times, “Preserving the Core” is about role enhancement for finance leaders and leadership in designing a budget process that uplifts your school system’s academic ambition.
And as the finance leader, you might not OWN the decision but you can help own the decision quality of the decisions.
These five phases will make decisions more comprehensive, clearer, and more connected to your mission.
CCDF State plans are coming! This is the second brief in a series focused on supporting states preparing their CCDF state plans. For more context, start with the first brief here.
What is Alternative Methodology?
One of the most important developments in early childhood finance in the last decade has one of the most confusing names: “Alternative Methodology.” Despite the enigmatic name, it’s having a big impact on child care payment rates across the country.
To understand what makes this approach an “alternative,” we have to go back to the way child care subsidies have historically been set.
The federal Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG), also called the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF), requires payment rates for subsidies to be benchmarked to the “market rate.” States do a Market Rate Survey every two years to learn what child care providers charge in private tuition. CCDF guidance calls for setting subsidy rates at the 75th percentile of the market rate, meaning that a family using a subsidy could access 75% of the private market. In practice, few states have historically reached this benchmark due to underfunding and the trade-off between higher rates and more children served.
The problems with this approach are well documented: child care providers often set their tuition according to what parents can afford to pay, not their true costs. The result is underpaid staff and providers operating on razor-thin margins. In other words, the Market Rate Survey measures the price of the child care service, but the price does not always cover the cost. This mismatch is even more severe in low-income areas, where families can afford even less in private tuition, leading to inequities in subsidy rates across neighborhoods.
In the 2014 reauthorization of CCDBG, Congress recognized this issue and allowed states to set their rates using an “alternative methodology, such as a cost estimation model” instead of the Market Rate Survey. Essentially, this meant setting rates based on cost rather than price.
In 2020-21, New Mexico and DC became the first in the country to use Alternative Methodology to set their child care subsidy rates. Other states, including Virginia, Colorado, and South Carolina, soon followed. Recognizing the momentum behind the idea, the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) put out updated guidance on using Alternative Methodology in January 2025.
The HHS guidance requires states using Alternative Methodology to:
Submit a requestfor pre-approval from HHS that includes their plan for field engagement, data collection, and cost modeling
Collect data or use administrative data; data should be collected or updated within two years of submitting their state plan
Validate this data with input from providers in the field
Create a cost model or cost study using this updated data
Translate that cost model or cost study into rates, describing how rates compare to the costs of care
Notably, the guidance does not require rates to cover the full cost of care. Many states are working toward this as a long-term goal, but are not yet able to reach it with current funding levels. (Full disclosure, I was part of a group of cost modelers who provided input on the guidance as subject matter experts back in 2023.)
States can request approval to use Alternative Methodology as part of their regular CCDF state plan cycle or at any time during the cycle. If they are approved, the Alternative Methodology approach replaces the Market Rate Survey, although some states choose to continue to collect information on private tuition to inform their understanding of the full child care market.
How is Alternative Methodology Different From a Narrow Cost Analysis?
Confusing things even further, in 2018, HHS began requiring all states to conduct a Narrow Cost Analysis as part of their CCDF state plans. Knowing that not every state would want to go through the Alternative Methodology process and develop a robust cost model, they still wanted to be sure that each state had at least a basic understanding of the cost of care.
Both the Narrow Cost Analysis and Alternative Methodology are ways of understanding the cost of providing child care and the difference between price and cost. They differ in their level of nuance and detail:
Two Possible Paths For Your State
While every state has to complete the basic federal requirements, if you’ve read this far, we can assume that you’re interested in doing more than just checking a box. We have seen states use two different paths to move their early childhood system toward deeper understanding of the cost of care and meaningful action to improve early childhood funding.
Path 1: Lean Into Your Narrow Cost Analysis
If you embrace its potential, a Narrow Cost Analysis can be a great vehicle for understanding the cost of care. It doesn’t require federal pre-approval or extensive documentation, and it can still result in a strong cost model that you can use to answer critical policy questions. The key here is to fully understand what data you have and what you need.
First, evaluate what publicly available or administrative data is available. For example, do providers already enter staffing and wage information into a workforce registry?
Next, use surveys to collect the most critical information that is not available or not reliable. To ease the burden on providers, surveys could prioritize the most important cost drivers (e.g. such as compensation, benefits, facilities, and food) and use public tools like the Provider Cost of Quality Calculator for the less significant costs. These questions can be combined with the required Market Rate Survey.
If possible, it’s also a good idea to use some focus groups to validate your assumptions with providers in the field.
The resulting cost analysis can include nuances around geographic regions, ages, settings, quality levels, and workforce compensation that go beyond the minimum requirements. As long as the Market Rate Survey remains part of the equation when setting rates, this doesn’t require pre-approval. This can be a flexible approach for states on their way to prioritizing meeting the costs of care.
The benefits of this approach include:
Useful, robust cost information, particularly if the state has existing high-quality data and/or is willing to use surveys to collect it
Fewer administrative hoops to jump through, with no required pre-approval
More flexibility, including discretion about which data sources to use and how to engage the field
The major drawback is the lack of a clear signal about the state’s approach. Because the state is still conducting and using the Market Rate Survey, the field may not understand how cost estimates relate to their rates at the end of the day.
Path 2: Alternative Methodology
The Alternative Methodology approach will produce the most complete picture of actual costs and signal clearly where your state is headed. It is also a larger administrative lift: it requires federal pre-approval, documented field engagement, and detailed written methodology.
Like the Narrow Cost Analysis, Alternative Methodology can start with existing administrative data, but that data must be comprehensive and recent. Data collection should be thorough about filling in any gaps. Pursuing this approach means investing time and effort in educating providers about why it is important to share their cost data, supporting them to fill out the surveys, and listening to the field through focus groups or other qualitative engagement.
Benefits of Alternative Methodology include:
Clear Messaging and Goals. This is a clear way for states to communicate their commitment to understanding the real costs of providing child care and working toward meeting that cost over time.
Field Engagement. By educating and engaging the child care field about why they are pursuing this alternative route, states can build support and understanding for their approach.
Nuanced and Updated Data: Because this approach requires detailed, recent data collection, it can support a more detailed cost model that can give states a deeper understanding of how costs differ across settings, communities, quality levels, and more. States with strong, detailed cost models can use them to evaluate many different kinds of funding policy proposals, not just subsidy rates.
The major drawback of the Alternative Methodology approach is its administrative lift. States that have done it describe at least a year of data collection, engagement, and model-building before rates are set.
There is no universally right answer.
It depends on your state’s funding situation, political climate, existing data, capacity, and appetite for the work. Helping you think through those trade-offs is what this series is designed to do.
The child care field has shifted rapidly in the last decade to understand and incorporate the cost of care into its subsidy rates and policies. Alternative Methodology, wonky as it may sound, has been a major driver of this change. States should make an informed decision about the path that is right for them.
In 2025, state and local agencies across the country faced intensifying pressures. Tight budgets. Shifting school enrollment. Workforce shortages. Increasingly complex and uncertain policy environments.
And yet Afton’s client partners led with intention and clarity in service of their constituents. They made hard decisions. They improved opportunities for all.
Afton was proud to walk alongside them – designing, planning, and implementing ambitious policy and funding strategies through human-centered processes and rigorous data analytics.
Across 33 states and localities, Afton’s work centered on three priorities:
Strategic use of public dollars. We helped leaders assess, design, and implement funding policies and plans where they matter most.
Coherent state and local systems. We supported leaders in building government systems that work for families and learners, incorporating data analytics, human-centered engagement, and policy design into agencies.
Addressing conditions that lead to opportunity gaps. We provided insights & capacity to help partners to tackle root causes.
Certain themes held everywhere we worked: implementation matters as much as design. Workforce stability is a precursor to quality. Public leadership requires courage, clarity, a true love of mission, and trustworthiness at scale.
The pages that follow are a love letter to my talented, intentional, and fun colleagues at Afton and their impact in 2025. Their expertise is extraordinary. But in the public sector, expertise alone is never enough.
My colleagues understand real impact comes from a genuine commitment to mission and partnership. I see my colleagues showing up with humility, respect, and trust. And we see our client partners showing up the same way. Which created public impact that far exceeds even the smartest idea.
Carrie Stewart Founding Partner & CEO
Afton’s Impact at a Glance
These numbers reflect more than activity. They represent systems strengthened and capacity built. Across states and sectors, we worked alongside leaders to align funding, clarify decision-making, and translate policy into durable implementation. The result isn’t just initiatives completed, but infrastructure that will continue serving communities into the future.
K-12: Helping Schools and States Navigate Financial Uncertainty
Leaders across state agencies, districts, and charter networks are making high-stakes decisions in a volatile environment. This year, we helped them make strategic funding and policy decisions that hold up for current challenges and the resource-tight years ahead.
Turning State Policy into District Reality
Passing legislation is one thing. Making it work is another. Ambitious policy often stalls at the implementation stage. The same law lands very differently, depending on a district’s capacity and context.
Take mental health funding. Schools are increasingly expected to support student mental health as an important driver of academic success, while not typically being fully funded for it. We partnered with an advocacy organization to name that gap clearly and tie it to specific cost inputs.
In Rochester, MN, our work led to a new budget model that more effectively allocates resources in accordance with the district’s strategic plan. In Boston, district leaders are now putting into practice funding strategies we helped design, building more transparent and equitable resource allocation across their schools. Better policy by design. Stronger outcomes by implementation.
Project Highlight: Maryland
The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future applies to 24 county-level districts, including some of the nation’s largest systems and several in rural areas. They’ve been given the same policy, but have vastly different capacities to act.
Maryland’s Accountability and Implementation Board needed a partner who could advise at the state level while understanding what districts experience on the ground. Our team helped build implementation infrastructure so reform can happen on the ground.
After 18 months, the LEAs walked away with stronger budget processes, clearer systems for Minimum School Funding implementation, and experience navigating accountability requirements. And at the state level, the AIB gained a partner who could translate district-level challenges into policy-relevant insights. When implementation surfaced ambiguities, we helped develop solutions that kept the Blueprint on track.
Project Highlight: Massachusetts
In Massachusetts, we partnered with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to study how $3.4 billion in Student Opportunity Act and ESSER funds flowed through the system at the district and school level. The resulting report found that SOA funds reached the students the policy intended, and that the overlap with ESSER helped many districts sustain investments without the fiscal cliffs many feared. DESE now has a foundation to track how their funding reforms play out.
Helping Charter Networks Plan with Clarity
Charter school leaders know the reality: entrepreneurial spirit can sometimes be at odds with the headwinds. Enrollment is stagnant, costs keep climbing, future funding is uncertain, and student needs are rising.
Afton worked with 60+ charter school networks across 22 states to provide financial clarity in decision-making. We built scenario-based multi-year financial plans, created board-facing financial communications to tee up the right information for decisions, and pressure-tested growth plans before commitments got locked in.
I Dream Big and Independence Prep had something in common: neither had opened their doors yet. No students. No revenue. Just two leaders with a year of high-stakes decisions ahead of them.
We supported both schools in the window before students arrived, when the decisions that will shape a school’s finances for years get made. That meant facility strategy. Cash flow timing. Enrollment scenarios. Finance committee structure.
Both schools opened with facility strategies that matched their financial reality, operational costs mapped before contracts were signed, and boards equipped to govern, not just rubber-stamp.
Project Highlight: Texas
Vanguard Academy wanted to grow from 6,800 to 10,000 students via three new schools. The CFO had a number in mind to fund it, but needed more than instinct to bring it to the board with confidence.
We led a multi-month financial planning process that surfaced answers to pertinent questions in the decision making process: What does debt service coverage look like at different financing levels? What if enrollment comes in below plan? Which staffing assumptions don’t hold up at scale?
What we found was that central office positions had been growing proportionally with enrollment. We also uncovered a $2.3 million substitute line item that pointed to deeper data gaps between Finance and HR.
Vanguard is still growing. But now they’re growing with a single source of data truth, a staffing model built for scale, and a framework the team can use long after the engagement ended.
Early Care & Education: Building Systems That Work for Families
Early care and education systems have dramatically improved. But for many families, the day-to-day reality still feels fragmented. Hard to navigate, hard to afford, and hard to count on.
For ECE systems leaders, the challenge in 2025 wasn’t a lack of ideas, but the difficulty of translating policy into practice across complex, capacity-strained systems. Afton partnered with states to operationalize funding reforms, address workforce instability (including increasing pay), and strengthen the underlying infrastructure needed for programs to function more reliably for families and providers.
From Fragmented Funding to Coherent Systems
Early childhood funding often arrives through disconnected streams. Each with its own timelines and reporting requirements. Building coherence takes intentional effort.
In 2025, we did that work across a number of states. From redesigning how dollars flow, to building tools that help local leaders understand their own communities, the through line has been the same. Systems should adapt to families, not the other way around.
And the work is growing. We’re excited to be partnering with early childhood leaders in Arkansas and North Carolina as they build funding systems and policy frameworks that can actually deliver for young children and their families.
Project Highlight: Illinois
We were proud to help support the launch of the new Department of Early Childhood, designing funding mechanisms to direct resources equitably based on community needs and aligning program standards to support a comprehensive, simpler, and fairer ECE system for Illinois families, providers, workforce, and communities.
We were also proud to support the design and implementation of Illinois’ Smart Start Workforce Grants, which resulted in Illinois raising wages for early childhood workers, benefiting 16,857 teachers and caregivers across 8,878 classrooms.
And through our project with the Early Childhood Block Grant, we helped the state answer, “with limited funding, where does the next dollar have the most impact?” We built a methodology for equitable allocation that can persist year over year. In FY25, Illinois directed $9 million in quality dollars based on this approach, raising per-child funding minimums for 140 community-based providers.
Project Highlight: Louisiana
Leaders wanted to be ready to launch a formula for early childhood funding, while also making progress in the meantime. We built a statewide model showing where where gaps remain and what expansion would cost. When local leaders asked what this meant for their parishes specifically, we built a version they could use themselves. Now, through our partnership with Louisiana Policy Institute for Children, an interactive dashboard is available, helping local leaders to tell their own stories about community needs.
Workforce Development: Closing Gaps in Who Does the Work
Workforce gaps don’t just reflect shortages. They reflect barriers. Who gets recruited, trained, supported, and retained shapes who ultimately serves our communities. When entry points are narrow or advancement pathways unclear, systems strain. When those pathways are strengthened, communities benefit.
Building Workforce Systems That Actually Work
Workforce shortages don’t stay in one lane. They show up in schools that can’t find counselors or retain teachers, and employers who can’t find the people they need to grow.
The challenge is rarely a lack of will. It’s that the systems meant to develop, support, and connect workers are often disconnected from each other and their stakeholders.
In 2025, we worked across two very different workforce contexts to help partners do the hard work of building coherence: one focused on expanding who enters the behavioral health pipeline, and one focused on helping a public workforce system better understand the employers it exists to serve.
Different problems. The same underlying question: how do you build a system that actually works for the people in it?
Project Highlight: Illinois
Illinois could meet only 22% of its residents’ mental health needs. A 349:1 patient-to-provider ratio. Over a third of adults with co-occurring disorders receiving no treatment at all.
We helped the Illinois Behavioral Health Workforce Center build its first strategic plan, bringing together legislators, agencies, universities, and advocacy groups to identify 113 concrete actions across six goals.
They now have a blueprint addressing the full pipeline: early career pathways linking high schools to behavioral health careers, loan repayment in underserved regions, and Illinois’ first rural residency in psychiatry. Every goal has metrics reported directly to the legislators who control funding.
Project Highlight: Pennsylvania
MontcoWorks is a public resource designed to connect employers with qualified talent. The problem: most area employers didn’t know it existed, and some had misconceptions about who it served.
We worked with their team to figure out why, using employer focus groups, surveys, and a human-centered design process to build personas and map the real experience of trying to work with the system. What they found was that they couldn’t be all things to all employers, and trying to be was stretching their team thin.
The result was a clearer service model, reorganized personnel, and a new business services advisory council to own and carry the strategy forward.
Field Contributions: Adding to the Conversation
Afton’s impact extends beyond our consulting. Our team contributed to the broader field through research, writing, and public engagement.
Katie Reed published a series examining the tensions families experience navigating two different education systems before and after their children turn five. The education system asks families to stitch together fragmented pieces. Katie named what that feels like.
We’re proud of the curiosity and rigor our team brings to their client work. That energy shows up in the research they publish, the stages they present on, and the conversations they push forward. The work doesn’t stop at the deliverable.
Looking Ahead to 2026
The pressures that defined 2025 aren’t going away. Afton will keep showing up to find the opportunities in it all:
Strategic use of public dollars: helping leaders make resource decisions that hold up over time.
Coherent state and local systems: weaving connective tissue across stakeholders so when legislation and policy has the intended impact, benefiting communities and learners.
Addressing conditions that lead to opportunity gaps: tackling root causes, not just symptoms.
We expect to contribute to the evolving school choice landscape, increasing access to effective early childhood programs, and the strategic use of resources in an uncertain environment.
All in service of families, children, and communities.
While policymakers often debate early childhood and K–12 separately, families experience them as one continuous journey — full of hopes, tradeoffs, and structural contradictions. This is the first piece in a three-part series (the second and third are here) unpacking how we arrived here, how these systems are evolving, and what it would take to design a more coherent pathway for every child.
A working mother sits at her kitchen table after bedtime, far too many tabs open on her computer. She’s trying to sort out child care for her almost-three-year-old, deciphering program types, weighing cost and availability, mapping commutes, comparing hours to her work schedule. The waitlists are long — so long — for the programs that actually fit her life.
What’s a mom to do?
Her mind wanders ahead to Kindergarten. She scrolls through neighborhood school reviews, tries to interpret the school’s report card, and reminds herself that at least – finally – her daughter will have a guaranteed spot somewhere. That brings relief, but also uncertainty: What does she really know about this school? Will it be right for her child?
This contrast isn’t just emotional. It’s structural. It’s the lived reality of America’s educational divide.
Before age five, parents act as consumers in a market system – empowered in theory to choose, but with no guarantee of access. They chase openings. They juggle waitlists and subsidies. They compare home-based care, center-based care, preschool programs, willing and able family members, and whomever might have a slot.
At age five, everything changes. Children enter Kindergarten and become beneficiaries of a public system. They receive guaranteed access to a seat – usually tied to their address – with limited but growing opportunities to customize.
Families don’t experience their children in silos. Their needs and values don’t shift overnight. Yet our system forces them to code-switch at age five—from navigating a fragmented early childhood market to entering a structured public K–12 system.
Understanding the Structural Divide
To understand this structural divide, we can use a simple framework that clarifies how each system is built at its core — independent of current reforms or policy debates. We’ll explore historical context next, but for now, consider our systems along two dimensions:
The X-Axis: Access
Market-Based Access: In a market model, competitive forces determine where resources flow, and families access services based on price and availability. In our context, families match with available slots based on a variety of factors (e.g. timing of application, lottery, location, etc.). Access depends on navigating supply and demand.
Guaranteed Access: Every child has an unconditional right to a slot (often based on assigned location) for free and compulsory public services, regardless of background or needs. The system bears responsibility for providing space and services regardless of demand.
The Y-Axis: Degree of Curation
Customized: Families can design individualized learning journeys, selecting from various learning environments, pedagogies, curricula, locations, schedules, etc. to match their children’s needs and family priorities.
Standardized: Educational experiences prioritize uniform guidelines and expectations for what students should learn, how it should be taught, and how they are assessed. Consistency is prioritized over customization to achieve goals.
The Current Landscape
ECE (Upper Left Quadrant): High customization potential through market-based access. Families can theoretically choose providers matching their needs and preferences (if they can afford it and spots exist). ECE functions like a market, albeit with strong regulatory and subsidy overlays.
K-12 (Lower Right Quadrant): Historically, K12 has offered guaranteed access with standardized delivery at its core. Every child gets a seat, but most families get their assigned district school with standard hours, pedagogy, and curriculum. While choice is increasingly available, latest data from Pew Research Center suggests that out of the entire K–12 school population, about 83% are attending a traditional public schools (though some of these are exercising choice within their public school district, such as magnet or open enrollment options).
The Critical Enabler: Capacity and Infrastructure
What this framework risks obscuring is a critical truth: customization depends on capacity on both the supply side and the demand side. And capacity (an organization’s resources) depends on infrastructure (structures and systems that make it possible to use capacity productively). These are market enablers needed to achieve goals.
Consider that on the supply side, providers need start-up funding and incubation time to develop new offerings, and they need wherewithal to understand family needs and preferences, the capability to design targeted offerings, get those offerings to families, and to sustain them over time.
On the demand side, families’ ability to curate a learning journey demands time, system knowledge, social capital, and financial resources — things most often associated with higher income families. This is where market enablers (such as navigation support, transparent and user-friendly information, simplified application and enrollment systems, and supports to overcome logistical barriers like transportation) becomes essential— not as a static feature, but as a dynamic force that changes through a family’s unique educational journey.
The depth and quality of infrastructure and family support determines whether “choice” is real or illusory, whether customization serves all families or only the privileged. As both systems converge — seeking to combine guaranteed access with meaningful personalization — this support becomes the determining factor in whether this convergence promotes equitable access to quality in both ECE and K12, or exacerbates inequity in both.
The Central Questions This Raises
We understand the structural hurdles built over centuries that have gotten us to where we are today. But if we asked families what they need, the answer would likely fall out like this: reliable access to quality education services that fit their children’s needs, without undue burden.
If families want guaranteed access with meaningful ability to customize, how can we build policies with that as the central goal?
This framework prompts four critical questions that must be understood:
What works and fails in each quadrant? What do families gain from ECE’s market-based customization (choice but limited guarantee) versus K-12’s guaranteed standardization (access but limited customization)? What can the systems learn from each others’ strengths and mistakes?
Where do families actually want to be? Is there alignment between where systems are moving and where families need them to be? How does this vary based on family resources? How do preferences change with capacity and infrastructure supports?
How are both systems evolving across this matrix? Where is K-12 moving as it adds choice options? Where is ECE heading with a push for universal access? What early evidence do we see of what is taking hold and what is not, and why? How does this connect to family preferences?
What does convergence mean for policy design? If both systems are moving toward some level of guaranteed access with customization options, what governance structures, funding mechanisms, infrastructure and supports must we build to promote equitable opportunities and meaningful outcomes?
This structural divide didn’t emerge by accident. It is the product of centuries of policy choices, cultural norms, and fragmented governance — forces that have shaped the systems families navigate today.
In the next installments of this series, we’ll briefly step back to trace that history and then look forward, examining where both early childhood and K–12 are headed and what convergence could mean for policy design. For now, it’s enough to recognize the core truth at the heart of this conversation: families deserve a system that meets them where they are, rather than requiring them to adapt to the system they inherit.
It’s safe to say education leaders are dealing with one of the most uncertain financial periods in recent memory. The end of one-time ESSER funding. Enrollment declines. Policy volatility. State budget pressures. All of these forces are conspiring to create a uniquely complex environment for public education decision-making.
Education leaders from the school to the district to the state are making difficult choices, often with incomplete information, while maintaining staff morale and without losing the trust of the community.
But while we can’t control federal budgets or birth rates, there are things we can control. We can control how we plan. How we communicate. How we decide to show up as leaders.
At the local school system level, I believe there are four essential strategies that leaders can employ to navigate this environment. And while they won’t make your problems go away or make your jobs easier, I believe leaning into these four areas will help you serve your communities with greater confidence.
Discipline 1: Communicate with Clarity and Transparency
In uncertain times, when leaders are silent, people get anxious. It’s important to name the uncertainty, to address the proverbial elephants in the room.
Consider your board and finance committee. Share data about enrollment, funding, student needs, and cost trends. Don’t just describe the risks, make an attempt to quantify them. And outline the second-and-third-order effects on things like compensation, facilities, or growth.
Consider transparency with your staff on your operating context. While that might feel risky, we tend to find they appreciate hearing the same data and context that leadership is weighing. It’s important that this messaging be consistent, informative, transparent, and compassionate. We appreciated this example from KIPP North Carolina last year.
Finally, make sure your finance committee continues to function well. Maintain a consistent meeting cadence. Include members that are financially literate and capable of balancing rationality and empathy. A well run committee will help strengthen your own decision-making and provide appropriate checks on your logic when weighing hard decisions.
Discipline 2: Manage Risk with Scenario Planning
No plan fully survives contact with reality, even in the best of times. It’s certainly true right now. That’s why Afton urges school system leaders to scenario plan on their financial outlook – toward effective decision making on instructional strategies.
Start by identifying your major areas of financial risk. That could be state and federal budget risk. It could be rising student needs. It could be enrollment variability. It could the construction costs or facility maintenance costs.
For each, model out the base scenario, the best-case scenario, and the worst case scenario. You want to see the impacts of each, some, and all at once.
You are trying to be ready to act decisively no matter what version of the future arrives.
Discipline 3: Protect Cash to Preserve Flexibility
Even financially healthy schools and school systems can be whipsawed by reimbursement delays or enrollment timing. It’s imperative to have solid cash management practices to give your organization sufficient breathing room when surprises inevitably arrive.
Some concrete recommendations:
Keep at least 45-90 days of cash on hand.
Exercise discipline around submitting grant reimbursements promptly.
Start the process of establishing revenue anticipation notes or lines of credit now. The best time to do this is before you need it.
For smaller school systems and charter schools with limited access to capital, regularly project your monthly cash flow and update it each month. What gets measured gets managed.
Leaders must be able to forecast these dips and act early by adjusting spending, delaying large purchases, etc.
Discipline 4: Strengthen and Diversify Revenue
Enrollment management is becoming a more common lever to influence the revenue side of the equation for public and charter schools alike. Any organization that relies on per-pupil funding can benefit. Setting data-driven enrollment targets, investing in marketing systems and staff, and monitoring progress and course correcting as needed are all core skills in doing this work well.
Schools can also explore diversified revenue strategies to avoid single points of failure. What programs and services are you offering that are eligible for funding outside of the typical K-12 funding formula? Grants, philanthropic partners, fee-based services (after-school, summer schools/camps, facility rentals, etc.) and interest-bearing investments on reserves can all contribute to incremental revenue increases. When things tight, even small adjustments matter.
Lean In To What You Can Control
In periods of tremendous uncertainty, education leaders have the power to plan, to communicate, to anticipate. And by doing so can lead their communities with conviction, with steadiness, and with compassion.
