How Should You Use Your Resources to Accomplish Your Goals for School Improvement?

Now that you know how you are currently using your resources, you can make decisions about how you want to use them in the future. Reallocation decisions are never easy and usually require a significant amount of discussion among the people making budget decisions in the school. The reallocation discussion begins with determining what you want to do to achieve the goals you have set for your school. Effective organizations have clearly defined missions and measurable goals.

In planning how to achieve these goals, organizational leaders analyze the data and use the information learned from that analysis to establish strategies and action plans to achieve their goals and then allocate resources—people, time, money—to implement those strategies and action plans, as illustrated below.

Data Analysis > Learning Goals > Improvement Strategies > Action Plans > Resource Allocation

NCREL's Tool Belt can help you analyze your data and develop measurable student learning goals related to needs as shown by those data. The next step is to record the strategies you want to use to achieve those goals. Those strategies may be either instructional (i.e., the implementation of a specific literacy or numeric platform, the use of a specific pedagogy) or organizational (i.e., the use of teacher teams or the use of a new teacher evaluation instrument). Once the strategies have been agreed on, you will need to develop action plans for each strategy. An action plan is simply the plan for implementing the strategy. Next you must determine budget resources needed to implement each action plan. (Forms 6A–E are designed to help you estimate these costs.)