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How is the money currently being spent?
Before any decisions can be made about allocating resources, the decision-making group and its constituents need to know how resources are currently being used. A school's budget book usually does not tell the entire story. Many budget books are difficult for anyone to read other than the accountants. People, time, and money are the elements that must be considered in analyzing current spending
 Marguerite Roza, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, talks about transparency in school budgets.
Now that the context for resource allocation has been established, school leaders need to establish the principles that will guide the work. Basic principles are presented in the next section. Other principles may be added that are suitable to a specific context. Using guiding principles helps leaders work through complex issues. When a difficult decision has to be made, the principles can be reviewed for guidance.
This guide provides school leaders with a variety of tools they can utilize as they engage in the challenging work of resource reallocation. To help school leaders improve the alignment of their resources with their school improvement goals, Learning Point Associates has created this flexible and interactive series of tools. The tools will help you to analyze your use of available resources, to develop detailed descriptions of current allocations of staff, time, money and professional development activities, and to restructure these resources to more effectively align with school improvement goals.
School leaders may use the guide in a variety of ways and with several different audiences. Educators may choose to complete all of the activities or only those that are appropriate to their site-specific context. Further, this guide may be used to facilitate a needs assessment or to design site-specific professional development programs that will allow school leaders to target limited resources to practices that will improve student achievement. Learning Point Associates can also work with your school to design professional development activities that will help you make fact-based decisions that produce sustained school improvement.
The Resource Allocation Tool that follows provides a step-by-step process for allocating resources to support a school improvement plan, including forms to use in analyzing a school's current budget. This process is outlined in the flowchart on the next page.
This guide includes two categories of tools. The tools in the first section will assist school leaders as they analyze the current use of resources. The second set of tools, that appear later in this guide, will help you decide how to best use your resources to accomplish your goals for school improvement.
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