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:

1. Academic Targets. Identify who you’re trying to reach, what outcomes you’re after, and by when.
2. 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:

1. 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.
2. Fixed vs. Flexible. Specifically name what is known to be off-limits and what is viable to change.
3. 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:

1. Reduce. Lower cost with the same delivery method (e.g. reduce central office FTE by X%)
2. Redesign. Same goal with a different model (e.g. redesigning a master schedule before adding an FTE).
3. 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)
4. Adjust Revenue. Broaden the conversation beyond expenses to include revenue-centered topics like enrollment strategy, philanthropy, or new partnerships.
5. 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.