Financial Crisis in Dallas Schools
As reported by the Dallas Morning News and CNN, 375 teachers were laid off, 450 reassigned to other schools, and 40 counselors and assistant principals were let go due to a massive miscalculation in the budget.
You originally project a $64 million shortfall but now it's $84 million? Where did the other $20 million come from?
I find it hard to believe that the finance and accounting staff would not have access to some type of salary data. And you're telling me that, after "X" amount of years that the school district has been in existence, we're just now discovering that we have systems in place that don't talk to each other? That's why we can't get the right salary data? If that's true, we seemed to get by with no problems in the past using these same systems - what's different now?
That's precisely why finance and accounting staff should build the budgets. The administrative function is to review and approve the budgets.
It's my guess that the finance and accounting staff had very little to do with building the budgets. And after they were created, the finance and accounting staff we're probably not asked to do a high-level review for reasonableness or a technical review for accuracy. After all, simple variance analysis techniques would have revealed a shortfall of this magnitude.
As seems to be more and more the norm these days, good hardworking people (in this case - the teachers and others) are punished due to the incompetence of management. It's management's job to put processes in place so that these types of things don't occur. But rather than management loosing their jobs, I'm betting that after it's all over and done they'll do just fine.
