The Benefits of Budget Engagement: How budget simulations helped Syracuse City School District gain community input.

• Author: Adams, Chris

The Syracuse City School District (SCSD), accustomed to tight budgets and advocating to legislators for more funding, recently found itself in an unfamiliar position: It had more money than it could spend.

The extra dollars were due to an influx of pandemic federal stimulus grants plus staffing challenges that left more than 350 vacancies this past spring, from a normal district employment of over 5,000 people. Without enough staff, it was impossible to launch new programs, leaving $22 million in unspent stimulus dollars planned for use in 2021-22 to carry over to the current school year. "We don't usually have any money here in Syracuse, so we're in this strange space where we have money, and we can't spend it," Chief Financial Officer Suzanne Slack said.

In response, SCSD set out this summer to gather community feedback on how to prioritize the uses of its $157 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act [ARPA] and Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act [CRRSAA] funds, allocated over three years.

While these budget circumstances were unusual, what wasn't unusual was how frequently SCSD's leaders sought public input on their budget decisions. Rather than simply check a box in their budget process with an in-person public meeting that might attract only a couple of people, SCSD makes regular use of online budget engagement, in a variety of circumstances and across a broad spectrum of stakeholders--and gains significant benefits in the process.

These benefits include increased contextual understanding of how the budget works, greater trust built from learning about funding constraints, more accountability from district leaders in their funding decisions, and more empathy from raising awareness of the consequences of budget decisions, such as how they specifically affect students, families, teachers, and staff.

The combination of budget simulation tools and broad outreach to increase participation in the exercises "has really changed things here," Slack said. "There's a very simple way to explain these numbers that are huge and overwhelming to the public," she said, and budget simulations transform the engagement process so "it's not a math problem, it's an operational decision-making tool."

SEEKING PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

The public expects a certain level of data accessibility, and those expectations are on the rise everywhere, from personal banking to federal taxes. SCSD is meeting that trend in schools through increased...