What is Student-Based Budgeting (SBB)?
Student-Based Budgeting (SBB) is a way to build a school’s budget by providing them dollars instead of allocated staff. In a student-based budget, the school receives an amount of money for each student they serve with some adjustments accounted for student needs. The school then determines the number of staff, supplies, materials and other expenditures wanted within their budget.
Schools receive a mix of allocated dollars through SBB and allocated staff from central departments. Most core expenses are paid from SBB, though many direct student services are provided by allocated staff (e.g., special education, speech therapy, social workers, etc.).
The district uses the SBB system to increase transparency and decentralize decision-making (more of the decisions about how to staff a school are made at the school level). This supports customizing the budget to meet the unique needs of students. SBB also aligns to the way that the district receives funding – on a per pupil basis.
How Does SBB Work in Jeffco?
For the portion of school services that are supported through SBB, Jeffco allocates financial resources to schools using a combination of enrollment, student and school characteristics. The table below describes the different components of the SBB formula and the criteria for how dollars flow to schools. View
the table below to see a larger version.
How Does Jeffco Distribute Dollars and/or Staff to Support Students' Needs?
The SBB formula deliberately allocates additional resources to serve students identified as "At-Risk" (see above). Together with Title I allocations, roughly $24M in SY21-22 was distributed to specifically support students experiencing poverty and/or homelessness.
Staff to support Students with Disabilities (SWD) and English Language Learners (ELL) are distributed by central office departments and do not flow through SBB. Schools receive staffing and other resources based on their overall enrollment, enrollment of students with disabilities and English language learners, and other factors (including student disability types, school size and location, etc.).
Is the Project Going to Analyze and Potentially Redesign SBB?
Jeffco has been using the blended model of both staff allocations and dollar allocations (through SBB) for about six years. Over time, various stakeholders have asked whether the system is working to achieve the most efficient and equitable distribution of resources. In response to these questions, the district has engaged a third party - (Education Resource Strategies) - to help analyze all of our financial data and identify areas for improvement.
The project started in April 2022 and will wrap up in January 2023, impacting the budgeting process for the 2023-24 school year.
Is the District Considering Getting Rid of SBB?
The district is open to significantly changing the way that staff and funds are budgeted at the school level. To date, many of the challenges identified relate more to the broad issues of declining enrollment. Declining enrollment creates constraints on school resources regardless of how staff and funds are budgeted and simply changing the approach to budgeting will not fix the underlying problem.
For example, schools currently receive allocated staff (rather than SBB dollars) to try to meet the needs of students with special needs and/or address social emotional well-being. Schools still often feel these allocated staff are insufficient to meet the needs of students. Distributing staff versus dollars does not fix the root problem of declining enrollment that has led to less overall district funding (adjusted for inflation) and resources spread too thin to be as impactful as we all want.