This week I am attending the Quality New Mexico conference and will present several concurrent sessions and meet with the Strengthening Quality in Schools group for a short speech and question time. Last week, I spoke at a meeting of school superintendents in California. The top issue for everyone these days is budgeting in difficult times and how to spend less money without negatively impacting classrooms.

When asked questions about budget, I like to describe our zero-based budgeting process we use in our school system. Every year, we ask budget owners to start from scratch and define expenditures that need to be made and show how the expenditures are aligned with the strategic priorities of the school system and the goals of the strategic plan. We take the concept to the department improvement plan and school improvement plan level. Every improvement plan defines 2-3 improvement goals aligned with district goals. The improvement plan must show the strategy that will be used to make improvement. The improvement plan also requires development of a deployment plan that shows resources needed, person(s) responsible and evaluation indicators. What our improvement plan process does for our school system is to align the resources to the improvements we need that help us reach our strategic priorities. Of course, the top strategic priority is improving student learning outcomes. We were able to reduce expenditures this year by over $4 million without having a negative impact on classrooms. I also like to remind people that our school system is in the bottom 10 in NC for expenditures per pupil

Another side of the budget equation that many people tend to forget is revenue. In our school system we are constantly looking for innovation that might produce revenue. We have developed a leadership academy concept that produces revenue through training of other school systems. We are marketing on-line courses and on-line reading intervention programs to home-schoolers that is producing revenue. We are offering supplemental education services through No Child Left Behind to other school systems as a revenue producer. We are working with community partners to gain grants so that summer enrichment programs can be implemented to replace our traditional summer school. We are looking at every process to find efficiencies so that we can reduce operating cost. We have implemented LEED certified green schools to save operating costs in utilities.

While these are difficult times, the excitement of innovation is something that is always present in our school system. The Baldrige Criteria requires innovation and the Baldrige Award is the President's highest honor for performance excellence and INNOVATION. Our countries very survial will depend on our ability to be innovative and create the products that large economies like China and India will want in the future.