Week 5 ED 5342 reflections on this course

This course could not have come at a better time in my career. I have been a principal for six years and just gone with the flow of working with my budget. I have always had a good budget clerk to help me with the “monster” until last year. I had a budget clerk who was not happy with my appointment and worked against me in every area. I had to learn how to assign money to certain codes, how to decide what I could purchase with Title one and three money as well as how I could use compensatory education funds. Up until this year I just would ask my secretary to see where we had money and would go from there. This year with a change of secretary I had to learn how to do everything in regards to budget. As I am planning for next year, I am using so much of what we have learned to project how I will spend our different allocations. I also now understand how they come up with the amounts I have been given. With all we have had to complete for this course I have met so many people I would otherwise never have interacted with in the past (ie: the business office manager, the CFO, their secretaries, etc). Analyzing the competencies for superintendent there are some we have been introduced to, others we already had experience with as campus leaders and finally there are quite a few we are learning more about with each class. With this course I can honestly say I have learned a great deal I had almost no experience with and I am so glad it came when it did. With all that our state is facing with funding or lack thereof, we have learned so much about funding formulas, what the state does to keep public schools funding “equitable and fair” and a lot about the regulations TEA has put in place to keep schools honest and for the benefit of the communities they school districts they serve. In reviewing the post assessment regarding competency 8, I feel my strengths are those dealing with personnel, management of time and working collaboratively with the board when creating a budget. I also feel I have strength in the area developing and implementing technological plans for more efficiency and effectiveness within our district. I have worked with the HRS department many times when recruiting, as we have worked to downsize within our district over the past two years. I have also served on many technology committees at the district level to analyze the needs of the district and different products we are adopting to make our district technology teacher friendly, facilitate parent use these programs and for purposes of enhancing our operations. The key assignment that really opened my eyes to school finance was the in week three where we had to compare and contrast two districts and the weight of their students. I had always been responsible for labeling at risk in peims and never really took it that seriously, as I never knew HOW MUCH we would gain or lose with each student. When I saw how much information goes into each report it was very clear to me as a campus leader how important each submission of data is. I now realize why we get so many opportunities to clean up this data and how we need to take each of these opportunities seriously to ensure we get appropriate funding. I had never looked at district data and seen how my district compares to other districts.  I will also be honest when I say I feel so much more empowered when I read finance articles that are a result of our current legislative session, when I speak with my state representative about decisions being made and when I speak with my CFO about priorities like we did in week 2.  I also learned to navigate the TEA website when investigating about WADA and ADA weights as we did in week 3. The most challenging, yet powerful experience of this course was our ability to work as both small groups and as a cohort. When we all felt stumped and unable to advance we had no problem not only looking to our small groups but expanding to the cohort to ask for help, to work together and to learn to be patient and work together to understand the complexities of  school finance. It was really nice to be able to ask each other questions, bounce ideas off each other and use our prior experiences to help up get to the different answers we needed to complete the assignments. Online courses has its pros and cons, but I really feel we work well together as a group and I am confident this will continue until we finish this certification!