In a time marked by declining enrollment, shifts in federal policy and rising costs, the board’s role as stewards of local education finance is more critical than ever. In response to concerns from board members around the state, CSBA hosted a webinar, “Maximizing Impact: Prioritizing investments for students’ long-term success,” featuring education researchers from WestEd sharing the current budget landscape and strategies on navigating uncertain budget scenarios. Fresno Unified School District Board President Valerie F. Davis joined the panelists to talk about the district’s student outcomes-focused governance and the board’s oversight role.

CSBA Research and Education Policy Development Department Senior Director Mary Gardner Briggs outlined member concerns about the challenge of handling budgets during an uncertain period. “The bottom line is thinking about how you as a governance team can approach your role in the school budget process with an impact on student outcomes in mind,” she said.

WestEd Education Finance and Systems Planning Research Associate Patrick McClellan outlined the trends impacting education finance in California. McClellan reviewed the enrollment forecasts over the next 10 years and the next 19 years.

“The reason this is relevant to revenue is that overall enrollment is forecasted to decline by 16 percent between now and the school year 2044–45,” he said. “What is notable here is that there are some counties that are forecasted to have an increase in enrollment, but mostly urban or suburban counties in the Bay Area as well as Southern California are forecasted to experience pretty significant enrollment declines.”

The immediate forecast, however, predicts a 1 percent decline in enrollment overall from 2025–26 to 2027–28. McClellan said LEAs’ budget projections are forecasting flat revenue on average, with just a 3 percent gain in the three-year period, and that LEAs are projecting a significant amount of deficit spending over the next several years. “Overall, what we’re seeing is flat ADA [average daily attendance], flat revenue and a lot of uncertainty in terms of federal revenue,” McClellan said.

School boards have a critical role in being stewards of the LEA budget. In times of fiscal uncertainty, it is important to enact strategies for prioritizing investments that center both student need and student outcomes, explained WestEd Education Finance and Systems Planning Director Kelsey Krausen.

“Why is it important to take a systematic approach to prioritizing investments?” Krausen asked. “We know that most schools and districts offer a really wide range of programming and services for student beyond just the core curriculum — after-school programming, summer school, tutoring, social-emotional learning, edtech, just to name a few — but many of those programs don’t have clearly defined objectives and metrics for measuring whether or not they’re having their intended impact on student outcomes.”

Krausen shared some high-level considerations for budget decisions. She recognized that LEAs have made great progress in using student data to understand needs in the system.

“Some districts are using data not just to look at student needs but also student outcomes to understand the effectiveness of programs,” Krausen said. “It’s the next step districts can take in really understanding what are those programs that are providing a real value-add for students, schools, for teachers, and then pairing that data with data on costs to understand, for every dollar spent, what is the return on investment we’re seeing?”

That information needs to be used with the available budget data in thinking about how to prioritize and make decisions about the budget. This approach is known as Academic Return on Investment. Using all this data together allows LEAs to look at programs in a more holistic way including non-monetary resources like the time invested.

Krausen outlined basic steps to begin the process of evaluating programs to prioritize investments:

• Determine which programs to focus on — usually high priority and aligned with Local Control and Accountability Plan goals — then inventory those programs. Are there clear objectives aligned with metrics and are milestones being met?
• Pair that impact data with data on costs and budget constraints.
• Determine which of these programs might need to be sustained over time due to their impact on improving student outcomes and which are ready to sunset because they aren’t having the intended impact.

Krausen offered a word of caution in evaluating programs. “It’s important to peel back the data layers — sometimes you may identify that a program is not actually having its intended outcomes, and it may have more to do with the implementation than the actual intervention,” she said.

Fresno USD’s board has a new initiative around student outcomes-focused governance. “We believe that student outcomes don’t change until adult behaviors change,” Board President Davis said. “Our student outcomes-focused governance emphasizes the board’s role of less day-to-day management and more about ensuring budget decisions serve the district’s student-centered mission.”

The board began last spring by holding listening sessions where board members went out two-by-two to different stakeholders and used the feedback to create four basic goals. They included guardrails for what the board would and wouldn’t do and how they would hold administrators accountable. The goals are early literacy, literacy interventions, college- and career-ready students and ensuring they have the life skills to face the “complexities of being an adult and contributing to society.”

The board also studied the district’s data to measure trends and will use that baseline data to monitor how the new initiatives are performing going forward.

“It has helped us truly focus our work and hold everyone in the system accountable,” Davis said. She emphasized the importance of monitoring data and collecting feedback from teachers and students. “That which gets measured, gets results,” Davis added.