The St. Paul school district finally is getting strategic with its budget.

In the coming weeks, staff will evaluate more than 90 programs, practices and partnerships the district has supported for at least four years.

Some of those commitments will be cut off to free up resources for the district’s latest priorities: school climate, culturally relevant instruction, and college and career preparation.

“This is really exciting for me because I think this is how budgets are supposed to be made,” board member Mary Vanderwert said at a meeting last week.

In the past, the district largely has set its annual budgets by taking whatever it spent money on the previous year and increasing that amount for inflation.

Board members, notably Steve Marchese, who followed through on a 2018 threat by voting against budget adoption in June, repeatedly have called for a more thoughtful process.

Several months ago, Chief Financial Officer Marie Schrul introduced a priority-based budgeting model from the Government Finance Officers Association. She said the district’s academic and finance leaders are working together to “set your priorities first and then build your budget.”

“We’re aligning everything to our priorities and student outcomes,” she said. “It’s been a total change.”

They’ve seen hiccups, however, in determining what those priorities really are.

A community survey around three focal points of Superintendent Joe Gothard’s strategic plan was packed with jargon, Marchese said, and parents fretted it would be their only opportunity to weigh in on the budget.

Survey respondents also were overwhelmingly white, administers acknowledged. The district now is seeking out parents of color to fill it out.

CAN’T FUND IT ALL

Gothard, who has been superintendent since July 2017, unveiled his strategic plan in December 2018. He put some early pieces of that plan in place this school year, embedding teacher coaches in 28 struggling schools, hiring counselors and work-based learning coordinators, and restoring a third daily elective class in middle schools.

Next year, he’s looking to make instruction more culturally relevant and do more in two areas: school climate and preparing students for whatever they’ll do after high school graduation.

His strategic plan also calls for evaluating programs and dropping the ones that don’t seem to be making a difference.

“When you try to fund every priority, both existing and new ones, it just simply isn’t enough,” he said.

Gothard said an initial pass last year at deciding what to “stop, start and sustain” didn’t work.

“We got nowhere,” he said.

This year, they’re being more deliberate.

EIGHT CRITERIA

Research director Stacey Gray Akyea has a list of 92 programs, practices and agreements for which the district offers money, staff time, building space and/or access to student records. They include the elective course AVID, which seeks to prepare promising students of color for college, as well as programs outside the school day, such as Lego League and College Possible.

Programs funded at the school level or those protected by law or board policy are not under scrutiny.

By Dec. 9, Gray Akyea and six others will evaluate each commitment on a rubric with eight criteria:

Fit: Is it easy to navigate and aligned to district objectives?

Financial feasibility: Is it worth our time, money and people?

Structure: Is there a specific focus and a logic or theory behind it?

Staffing: Can we easily find and keep the people who run and oversee it?

Effectiveness: Is there evidence of change in or out of the district?

Desire /demand/stakeholder interest.

Leg-acy: Does it have hidden costs or require excessive coordination by the district?

Equity: Is it grounded in equity, and what are the barriers to participation?

Gray Akyea said a tight schedule, necessary to give the school board time to put its stamp on the budget, means the evaluation will not be as robust as it will be in future years.

She doesn’t know, for example, exactly how many students participate in each program. And without rosters, she’ll be unable to analyze how well each one works.

“We’re being very careful with our recommendations,” she said.

Each commitment either will get a recommendation to “sustain” — to keep doing it — or it won’t.

“If you focus on what you want to sustain, then what you need to stop will become clear,” Gray Akyea said.

Gothard and staff hope the scoring system will help the school board stick to its guns when community members inevitably lobby to have their pet programs preserved.

“There’s got to be places where people understand we can’t do it all,” said Karen Randall, assistant director for strategic planning.