Reflection On Nathan Levenson's Smarter Schools

Having worked at a nonprofit, I had the opportunity to work on budgets, accounting, and help write request for proposals. As a classroom teacher, I have wondered how budgets line items, constrains, and legislation, et affect my teaching practice and program funding. For this assignment, I choose to read Smarter Budgets, Smarter Schools by Nathan Levenson. I chose this book because as a district, we have lost grant funding and I wanted to know what creative ways are available to keep, to some extent, the programs and services we offer our students. Four key ideas that stood out to me were:
1. The ideas of trading down which can provide new services and keep existing services during time of deep budget cuts. This was interesting because the author makes a good point that not everyone that teachers children should be a fully credentialed teacher. Those paraprofessionals can teach courses at a lower cost than a fully credentialed teacher. He uses the example of art classes, which are the first to be cut. If a teacher position is cut, the program could be saved or modified by having a paraprofessional teach a course, for example a museum part time art teacher.
2. …show more content…
Look with a fresh eye. As humans, we become creatures of habit and we conduct business as usual because it feels familiar and confortable. Looking at how the business runs with new eyes and dissect it can bring insight into how money is being spent and allocated. By going over and analyzing how money is spent and why can give management an insight on how money is being spent and is cost effective, is it best use of money, what services do we provide, staffing, et. This allows for management to get a deep understanding of the working dynamics of the organization and make funding decisions based on data and information