CONTEXT: A new strategic plan calls for rethinking resourcing 

How decisions are made, and who makes them, can impact the student experience.  

Rochester Public Schools in Rochester, MN used a highly centralized system for staffing and funding its schools. While nearly all decisions came from the central office, it was unclear how schools received the resources they did, how the district accounted for them, and who made the decisions. As a result, schools across the district had limited ability to select the targeted and responsive supports to meet their students’ unique needs.  

Leaders developed a new strategic plan that called on resourcing as a key leverage point, with the working hypothesis that more school-level flexibility to meet dynamic student needs could mean better outcomes. They wanted to explore a model that would balance a principal’s autonomy to serve the unique needs of the students in their school from year to year, while also ensuring stable provision of resources that all schools need.  

GOALS: Redesign funding allocation process to achieve strategic vision 

Together with Rochester Public Schools, we sought to design a policy and system to allocate funding to schools, programs, and central administration. The outcome would reflect a new sense of shared ownership, and an understanding of common guiding principles brought about by a community-sourced process.  

The Rochester team approached the project equipped with seven guiding principles they wanted to be true of a future funding system: it would be a system that is effective, efficient, coherent, predictable, transparent, responsive, and equitable. With those guiding characteristics in mind, they engaged Afton to help develop a model that explored the balance among the whole set, and to design a new funding strategy that served all.   

APPROACH: Holistic inquiry and meaningful dialogue 

National research confirmed what we already knew: there’s no one right way to do resourcing; each community must assess its needs, capacity, and viable options for directing resources in the most efficient and equitable way that suits their circumstances. The Afton team employed our triangulation method, using meaningful and iterative engagement processes, national research, and data analysis and modeling to guide the RPS community’s conversation about what their unique schools and communities need and how to provide for those needs. 

In alignment with the guiding principles, we convened a subset of school community members to serve as an advisory group for designing the new system. Once we had the group together, we learned how they saw the current decision-making processes responding to school-level needs, where more principal autonomy may better serve needs, and the potential impacts and tradeoffs between centralized provision and school leader empowerment. We sought to explore the question, “who gets decision-making authority, in which situations, why, and to what degree?” 

For instance, while some assume principals prefer an instructional leadership role rather than a resourcing leadership role in the school, that’s not a universally true preference. And yet, to ask them to do things like select and match special education services to individual students creates a significant demand on their time, burdens them with the need to know what’s most appropriate for every need, and sets aside the expertise housed at central administration. The initial conversations ensured a shared mental model about what was happening in schools and the extent to which certain decisions could be determined at the school level. 

Once we understood current experiences and thinking, we used data collection to do current state modeling of existing resourcing. We created scenarios based on the “rules” as they currently stood, which helped to surface where there was flexibility in the distribution of decision-making between the central office and principals. We then changed different “rules” within the system to model out different resourcing strategies, as discussed by the advisory board and found in national research. We brought the scenarios back to the advisory group, presenting them with a list of three options: more central office, “highly guaranteed” decision-making; more school-based, “flexible” decision making; and a hybrid of the two. Through an interactive engagement process, we collected and aggregated their feedback to craft a way forward that reflected the group’s desires for determining resource allocations. The process allowed the group to evaluate what types of decisions would lend themselves well to the expertise, capacity, and general oversight of the central office, versus which decisions could benefit from the principal’s local understanding and leadership. 

OUTCOMES and IMPACT: Dynamic and thoughtful resourcing as a strategic pillar 

The RPS leadership and advisory group found a new balance of decision-making that better reflected their students’ needs and led to the unanimous passing of a referendum in January 2025.  

As a result of the process, Rochester Public Schools now has a more transparent distribution of resources that allows for more principal autonomy and decision-making. For example, while central office will retain oversight of special education services, multilingual learner needs, and labor-related decisions, principals will now have more control over student supports and enrichment choices. Before the work, it was difficult to account fully for the district’s resources, or who was deciding where they went. Going forward they have a more complete record, a new and meaningful way to talk about resourcing, and clarity around both the decision-making process and resource use. 

Profoundly, the model implementation inherently requires continuous feedback and engagement between principals and the central office. This has already begun to result in a more collaborative and cohesive dynamic, as principals and central office will communicate more often and regularly share assessments of needs and decisions. With the new budgeting approach, Rochester leaders and principals can expect to meet student needs more readily and more equitably while ensuring sustainability and minimizing burdens.