Fiscal Fitness for School Administrators: How to Stretch Resources and Do Even More With Less

Robert Ramsey

$23

This no-nonsense handbook covers every aspect of fiscal fitness for today’s schools, from cutting costs without cutting essential programs and accomplishing as much as before—or more!—with less staff to running a low-cost, no-frills activity program.

Based on years of front-line experience, this guide includes tips on:

• The role of principals in hard times
• Cost containment
• Downsizing
• Creative staffing
• How to get the biggest bang for your program buck
• How to get everyone involved in fiscal fitness
• How to find, raise, and attract money in hard times
• How to make the most of time—the resource that keeps on ticking

There isn’t a principal anywhere who doesn’t have questions about how do more with less. This is the book with the answers!

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The Principal's Guide to School Budgeting

Richard Sorenson & Lloyd Goldsmith

$27

Effective administrative practices, both budgetary and academic, are continually being redefined at all levels by state, district, and school deregulation, decentralization, and restructuring. Keeping up with all the changes and meeting expectations is a challenge. This unique budgetary survival guide will enhance your instructional, technical, and managerial skills not only as the school’s leader, but also as the school’s visionary, planning coordinator, and budgeting manager.

You will find an overview of school budgeting practices within a collaborative decision-making context, and ways to link educational goal development and resource allocation management. Special features include:

• Discussion questions
• Case study applications and problems
• Experiential activities
• Budgeting checklist for administrators
• Selected templates, forms, and resources

This valuable desk resource is intentionally organized into brief, single-topic-focused chapters, which will teach you how to develop a budget, monitor funds, manage budget reports, and prepare school action plans that are aligned with a strong fiscal accountability system.

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School Budgeting for Hard Times: Confronting Cutbacks and Critics

William Poston, Jr.

$25

Are you challenged to improve your school's productivity with existing or even diminishing resources? It can be done, and School Budgeting for Hard Times will show you how. Author William K. Poston, Jr. has fought and won many budget battles.

Have your copy signed by the author Friday, March 18, at our Finance Institute.

He and renowned educator Fenwick W. English, who provides the book's foreword, contend that the needs of curriculum and learning should drive the budgeting process—not the other way around. The solution is implementing performance-based budgeting. This text gives step-by-step instructions for:

• Using assessment data to determine budget priorities
• Applying quality enhancement principles to the process
• Incorporating measurable performance to attain funding

Discover how to do more with less. These proven strategies will help you attain the truly important goals while avoiding the dire cutbacks that threaten local educational systems’ effectiveness.

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The Strategic School: Making the Most of People, Time and Money

Karen Miles & Stephen Frank

$25

How can schools best use the resources they already have? That question is at the heart of this inspiring book for school and district administrators challenged with increasing student performance without additional funding. Karen Hawley Miles and Stephen Frank demonstrate how educational leaders can develop successful and strategic schools by assessing how well they use all available resources—people, time, and money—and by creating effective alternatives to meet goals.

The authors use their extensive research with urban schools and districts to present case studies of schools that successfully reorganized resources to implement the "Big 3 Guiding Resource Strategies": improving teaching quality, creating individual attention, and maximizing academic time. The Strategic School offers planning guides, checklists, worksheets, and strategies aligned with ISLLC standards to help leaders:

• Assess current resource use in new ways that go beyond the typical budget review
• Organize resources more creatively and flexibly
• Craft a master schedule that works
• Connect resource allocation to student and school performance

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What Brain Research Can Teach About Cutting School Budgets

Karen Olsen

$27

In tough economic environments, budget cutting is a daunting but necessary task for many school administrators. Karen D. Olsen takes an exciting, unique approach by applying brain research to budgeting. Now educators can make the decision-making process more objective by using analytical thinking in school budgeting rather than responding to emotion, tradition, or outside influences.

Providing a strategy-builder chart, this book

• Offers action items for putting the strategies into practice
• Helps leaders determine where money should be reinvested or reallocated
• Provides specific tips for working within a group decision-making setting
• Includes more than 30 analytical charts to aid in gathering needed information

What Brain Research Can Teach About Cutting School Budgets offers principals and district leaders a methodical process for taking subjectivity out of the budgeting process.

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FUNdraising: 50 Proven Strategies for Successful School Fundraising

Frank Sennett

$19

The author presents an abundance of creative and cost-effective fundraising strategies designed to engage the community and bring in significant dollars.

Offering real-life examples of administrators, teachers, parents, students, and local supporters who have pulled off popular and lucrative fundraisers in schools across the country, this book:

• Provides savvy organizing tips
• Offers guidance on ethical issues
• Gives advice for avoiding fundraising mishaps
• Contains lists of potential outside partners and sponsors
• Includes resources about online fundraising and grantwriting

If you want to host events that raise spirits along with money and if you want to look back at your school's revenue-raising efforts with pride rather than relief that they're over, then this may be the book you've been waiting for!

Wayne Young, Executive Director, General Counsel
Rhonda Caldwell, Deputy Director
Clyde Caudill, Legislative Liaison
Wanda Darland, Web, Publications, & Affiliate Services Coordinator
Shirley LaFavers, Director of Professional Development

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