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At Work At School

An Afton Partners Blog

All Posts

Affording Quality Schools – Solutions and Remedies 1 and 2: Reinventing Funding Formulas and Services with Costs That Seem Fixed

This is the second installment of Afton’s five-part blog series, “How Districts Can Afford High Quality Schools, Despite Enrollment Decline,” aimed at recognizing school district financial challenges associated with enrollment decline and offering some actionable recommendations for school districts facing enrollment loss, with or without charter schools. SOLUTIONS TO AFFORDING QUALITY SCHOOLS At Afton, our… Continued

How Districts Can Afford High Quality Schools Despite Enrollment Decline: Defining The Problem

This is the first installment of Afton’s five-part blog series, “How Districts Can Afford High Quality Schools, Despite Enrollment Decline,” aimed at recognizing school district financial challenges associated with enrollment decline and offering some actionable recommendations for school districts facing enrollment loss, with or without charter schools. Earlier this year, The Center on Reinventing Public… Continued

Don’t Leave Money on the Table: Medicaid Reimbursements for School Districts

One of the most persistent themes in post-recession K-12 education has been continually increasing expenses with largely stagnant state and federal revenues. Inevitably this has led to budget deficits and painful cost cutting in many school districts around the country. Typically, school districts do not think about opportunities to maximize revenues, as they have no… Continued

Afton Leads Discussion on New ESSA Financial Transparency Requirements

One key component of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) focuses on fiscal transparency and school-level financial reporting. This shift from current reporting practices requires states and districts to provide per-pupil expenditures of federal, state, and local funds for each individual school. Although the US Department of Education has delayed the effective date of ESSA… Continued

Putting into Practice: A Conversation with Leading School District Practitioners on Personalized Learning

Afton Partners’ Scott Milam and Katie Morrison-Reed facilitated a conversation with leading practitioners from school districts across the country on best practices to implementing and sustaining innovative personalized learning models at iNACOL’s 2015 Blended and Online Learning Symposium in Orlando, Florida. Through Afton’s work with school districts from coast-to-coast, the team recognized unique innovations happening… Continued

Altering Authorizing

Charter school authorizers seek to ensure the quality of our nation’s public charter schools. Key to ensuring quality is having robust measures for accountability—academic, governance and financial. This work is of heightened importance given the Trump administration’s focus on expansion of school choice… Continued

Making Way for Change

Evaluating Financial Policies and Processes to Support District-wide Personalized Learning Initiatives – Due to advances in technology and promising early results, leaders in education are increasingly attracted to personalized learning models as they seek to meet the needs of students… Continued

No Small Change: Managing Transitions in School Finance Leadership

Transitions in Finance Leadership Can Be Challenging. Here Are Some Ideas. – At any organization, unplanned changes in financial leadership create knowledge gaps that take time to fill. No less is this true at charter management organizations or public school districts. In particular, many CMOs are relatively small organizations with limited finance capacity other than the role of the CFO… Continued