Context

Vanguard Academy is a charter network in Texas, operating 10 schools across multiple sites, serving 6,000+ students. Elementary and high schools often share campuses (e.g., Beethoven Elementary physically shares space with Beethoven Early College High School). This arrangement directly serves families well, but also creates financial complexity.

Vanguard’s leadership wanted to grow from 6,800 to 10,000 students from organic growth and by opening three new schools. To do that, they needed significant debt and assumed $130 million was the right number.

Their ambitious goals were deeply rooted in serving their community. But they still needed help answering a few key questions like:

• What does our debt service coverage look like under different expansion scenarios? What trade-offs exist at different financing levels?
• What are our tradeoffs as we scale for financing, for staffing, for student experience?
• Do our own numbers tell us the truth?

Vanguard’s CFO, Carlo Hershberger, needed data analytics, needed a second set of eyes, needed to make decisions off more than instinct. He needed a clear framework, defensible numbers, and a way to communicate risk tradeoffs to their board.

Goal

Vanguard engaged Afton to build a financial model assessing their expansion’s feasibility, sustainability, and viability. Their immediate questions focused on affordability of opening three new schools, debt service realities, and a scalable staffing model.

Underneath those questions was something more fundamental: Vanguard needed a repeatable methodology to evaluate growth decisions their team could use long after the engagement ended.

Approach

The engagement unfolded over eight months in two phases. What began as model-building expanded into a clearer picture of Vanguard’s financial and operational reality.

Getting the Data Right

Afton started where financial planning must start: with the data. When the team compared salary budgets vs. staffing sheets, the numbers didn’t match. Positions were missing. Categories were inconsistent.

One line item stood out: $2.3 million budgeted for substitutes. A significant number that raised questions about what else might be obscured.

Rather than negligence, we realized they’d recently changed accounting systems, which created gaps. Folks in Finance and HR were making decisions in isolated silos, unaware of the down-stream effects in systems, expenses, and reporting consequences. It became apparent there was no single source of data truth.

Afton worked with both departments to build a translation layer reconciling staffing data with the budget. With cleaner numbers, the team introduced driver-based planning and helped HR consolidate ten position categories into four (Teachers, Aides, School Leadership, and Operations), creating a simpler framework for projecting staffing as the network grew.

Rethinking Debt

Many school leaders think about debt the way car buyers think about monthly payments: “Can we cover $X per month?” That’s the wrong question. The better question is, “What percentage of recurring revenue goes to debt service? And what are we giving up?”

Vangaurd came in contemplating $130M in new debt service to open three schools. To help leadership evaluate that option, Afton modeled debt service coverage at multiple levels and showed what trade-offs existed at each.

That’s where the accounting structure created challenges. Vanguard reported financials by school, not by site. Beethoven Elementary and Beethoven Early College High School appeared as one entity in financial statements, even though they had different expense structures and revenue profiles. This made it difficult to see true per-site performance, and harder still to project how new debt would affect individual campuses.

Afton built site-specific debt allocation into the model, giving Vanguard visibility they hadn’t had before. They also applied a key benchmark: occupancy costs (including debt service) should stay within 12-15% of per-pupil revenue to remain sustainable.

The model revealed how debt service as a percentage of revenue would change under different circumstances. At higher debt levels, coverage ratios tightened and trade-offs intensified. At lower levels, Vanguard retained more operational flexibility. With site-level visibility and scenario analysis in hand, Vanguard’s leadership could see the full picture. They could make informed decisions about what level of expansion financing made sense for their context.

Planning for Full Scale

Their expansion goal was clear: grow from 6,800 to 10,000+. When we extended the model to eight-year projections (long enough to see new campuses reach full enrollment), the staffing assumptions revealed that the expansion wasn’t financially sustainable.

Central office positions had been growing proportionally with enrollment: more students meant more administrators and operations staff. We pushed back. Non-instructional roles shouldn’t scale linearly. By holding certain central positions static, Vanguard could capture savings that offset expansion costs and keep the growth financially viable.

The model also stress-tested enrollment assumptions. A 67% enrollment increase brings expenses that don’t appear in early projections, like marketing, student recruitment, new campus operations. Conversely, we also built scenarios showing what the financial picture looked like if enrollment came in below plan, giving Vanguard a realistic range rather than a single optimistic number.

Our model, dashboard, and recommendations empowered Carlo in front of the board and in finance committee meetings to show the reality the numbers revealed: what Vanguard could responsibly pursue, where the risks were, and what sustainability actually required.

“Working with Afton was truly incredible. The outcomes of this project were perfect. I am a happy, grateful client that would absolutely recommend working with Jorge and his team.” — Carlo Hershberger

Outcomes

Vanguard moved forward with expansion, but with clearer guidelines and confidence.

• Equipped leadership to make informed financing decisions. Scenario analysis showed debt service coverage and trade-offs at multiple debt levels, giving the board the data they needed to choose a path forward.
• Provided a roadmap for three new schools. Vanguard received detailed guidance on what opening West Lagos Elementary, West Lagos Secondary, and Monet Secondary would require financially and how to make it sustainable.
• Restructured staffing projections. Central office growth is now tied to strategic decisions, not automatic per-pupil formulas.
• Established a single source of data truth. Finance and HR now share reconciled data. Site-level performance is visible in ways it wasn’t before.
• Built a repeatable methodology. When leadership asks crucial questions about affordability, there’s a framework to answer the question.

Vanguard is still ambitious. They’re still growing. But they’re growing with eyes open.

Afton Partners provides financial planning and analysis for charter networks navigating growth, debt, and organizational complexity.