Running Head: BALANCING THE BUDGET

Strategies for Balancing the Budget

Cristina Velazquez
California State University San Bernardino
Dr. Louque

BALANCING THE BUDGET

Strategies for Balancing the Budget
The most important and basic system in creating, tracking and monitoring a budget is
accountability through a spread sheet or comparable system. The most popular spreadsheet
software used for budgeting is Microsoft Excel. A spreadsheet lets you organize a lot of
information easily and does the math for you. Budgeting strategies and techniques vary across
the board. Another important strategy is to determine the financial goals. There are two types of
financial goals: immediate and long range. Immediate goals refer to how you want to use your
money today, while long-range goals deal with how you want to spend your money in the future.
Both types are important and should be carefully considered. Weigh each goal against the next to
determine which one takes precedence. You need to determine which goals address necessities
and which ones cover luxuries. Then, you can prioritize the financial goals accordingly. For
example, within our world language department at Palm Springs High School, student
enrollments have fluctuated because of the new construction of the new high school, RMHS.
Currently, we have 3 Spanish teachers, 1 French teacher, and1 Latin teacher. Since enrollment
rates drive the budget within our department, we looked at possibly losing a teacher if numbers
fell way below 31 students per classroom. However, on the contrary, before the school opened,
each classroom was well above 40 students. Thus, a short term goal was to sell teacher prep
periods. This allowed for an extra period of language use, without having to hire another teacher
and eventually pink-slipping if enrollment rates dropped. A long term goal is to hire another fulltime teacher if enrollment rates consistently become too high and classrooms become too large.
A third strategy in balancing the budget is to have clear and transparent salary schedules and
categories. For example, there are currently 6 salary categories that correspond to the academic
requirement necessary for placement in each category; such a salary schedule is referred to as an

BALANCING THE BUDGET

index system. This system allows for a fair and systematically accounts for all teaching salaries
that make up about 85% of the budget within each school site. As an example using psudonames, Cristina has 8 years of experience with a master's level degree + 30 units which puts her
at $60,963. Trini has 8 years of experience with a B.A. +40 units, she is at $56,931. Roberto and
Carmen both have 1 year of experience each with only a B.A., they both make $42, 965 each.
Erika has 3 years of experience teaching with a B.A. +26 units, so that puts her at $45,988.
Svetlana has over 16 years of experience with a B.A. +54 units which puts her at $73,395. The
total for salaries within the world language department is $280,242 without any teacher selling a
prep period. A spread sheet will also allow for an organized way of seeing each teacher's course
load, with the number of students enrolled. In the salary budgeting process there are two areas of
focus: the salary range increase and the salary budget increase. Both support the compensation
strategy, and in the long term, achieve the desired competitive position. A fourth strategy in
balancing the budget is determining whether offering a class in a large size format is appropriate
or the maximum amount of students in each classroom per period. Within our departments, we've
recognized that any classroom with 40 or more is far too large and deems balance and the district
has recognized an average 31 students per teacher ratio. To figure if our department is
appropriately staffed, we add up the number of students enrolled per period per each teacher. Our
department (on average) should have 755 total students across Spanish, French, and Latin
classrooms. Anything that goes far over that number requires a teacher to sell the prep period in
order to accommodate to students. A key strategy is to continually look at the data and figure out
the enrollment rates within each language class in order to make sure the department is
appropriately staffed, and in order to keep personnel related costs down.