Time to say goodbye: Budget addition by subtraction

For many schools, it’s budget planning season and with that comes lobbying for a new line item or two in hopes of investing in new ideas. However, in the (hopefully) post-covid era, and most other eras, new expenditures can be hard to come by. That’s why it’s important to consider that the pathway to something new, may be paved with material created by recycling the obsolete.

I have been fortunate in my career to be in position to “pilot” a number of ideas and products. In the process of advocating for a new strategy or tool, you’re often met with the demand to show it’s ROI. Yet, departments are far less likely to apply the same scrutiny to something they’ve been doing for the last five, ten, twenty…twenty-five years. It’s as if we grant tenure to things once we decide they’ve worked a few years in a row and refuse to change course despite the unspoken truth that time has passed it by. It may not even be a time thing, it could be a senior leader who has since moved on, made something happen and despite its lackluster performance, no one has ever stepped up and put it to rest.

This isn’t a criticism of “the old way of doing things” because it stands to reason there was a time and place where it made complete sense and generated successful outcomes…but that doesn’t mean it should be the rule of law in perpetuity.