The question that every principal wrestles with come budget
time, do I invest in staff or training?
What your Assistant Superintendent, Business Manager, HR Director and
Title I Office want you to do is fill up on staff.
It’s the easy solution.
The budget is allocated, class size is reduced, and operational stuff
and things get done. I’m not saying they
are wrong. But I’m not saying they are right.
More staff just facilitates the status quo, just a little
more efficiently. But more staff rarely
changes anything. Sub-par instruction for
28 students isn’t made better by providing sub-par instruction to 21
students. And operational stuff and
things being taken care of have next to no impact on the classroom.
What I suggest (and did) is follow the advice of Great
Principals. Go LEAN. That’s right, don’t add staff. Instead invest in training. Train like there is no tomorrow. Improve the skill set of every adult on the campus. Make them more effective and more
efficient. That way when the budget is
squeezed and everyone else has to cut staff, you have a staff that is better
prepared to handle adversity and effectively teach any student in any setting.
Here are two, field tested ways to make this happen.
1.
Absorb a position. This is what E. Don Brown would do. If his staff allocation was 100 teachers he
would hire 99. Then with the unused salary, he would have $50,000 to $60,0000
as a training budget.
2. Capture
your vacancy. This is the solution that
I used. Everyone has a vacancy pop up
during the school year. The vacancy is
never filled immediately which creates a budget surplus (Central Office knows this and loves this). But while this
surplus is growing, everyone on the campus has to work harder. What this means is that the campus suffers
while the district reaps the reward. So,
I went to my Superintendent (Bob Brezina) with the following proposal, since
the staff was having to work harder and was short-handed, let me use the vacancy
surplus to bring in on-going training to reward the staff for stepping up.
Brezina loved the idea and my staff were among the best trained in the city.
Think.
Work. Achieve.
Your turn...
- Call Jo at (832) 477-LEAD to order your campus set
of “The Fundamental 5: The Formula for Quality Instruction.” Individual copies
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Summer Conference, TASSP Summer Conference, Virginia Middle and High School
Principals Conference; The National Principals Conference; The Fundamental 5
National Summit (Keynote)
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(Fundamental 5 Delivery Tool); PowerWalks CLC (Networked Formative Observation
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