Indiana state school funding will decline for the next 3 years.  The current 5% expense reduction is just the first step.   School districts need to take bold actions to reduce their underlying cost structures.  Other organizations are reducing costs by 10% and increasing labor productivity by 5-8%.  Innovative schools can achieve the same financial gains while improving the quality of education.  These 20 ideas may be infeasible, but they might help to generate some creative solutions.

1. Rank order career & technical programs and eliminate the single least effective one.
2. Replace some career and guidance counselors with web resources and volunteers from local civic group partners.
3. Assign administrators to jointly teach 1 FTE of classes in a technical field.
4. Employ technology for teaching and testing and eliminate 1 staff/department.
5. Carefully define “special needs” education and obtain separate funding or sponsorship.
6. Double the fees for extracurricular programs to cover all costs, including coaching supplements and subsidies for low-income students.
7. Maximize the use of capital budgets and bond funding for capital maintenance expenses.  Refinance bonds and use savings for capital maintenance.
8. Reduce employee benefits by one-half for the first 5 years of employment.
9. Add an additional teaching period for tenured staff.
10. Assign a mentee to tenured staff and provide incentives for retention/progress.
11. Provide teachers with a financial incentive in years 3-6 to remain in place.
12. Eliminate future degree/credit hours based compensation increases.
13. Outsource transportation, IT, HR, marketing and financial services.
14. Extend textbook lives by 2 years.
15. Move to a used computer strategy, recycling the 3-year-old units from local businesses.
16. Consolidate library/AV staff and resources with community libraries.
17. Reduce the cost of transportation by increasing the share of walkers, reducing the number of stops and limiting extra services.
18. Move discipline problem students to countywide alternative programs after 3 strikes.
19. Collect fees for AP and dual credit programs.
20. Increase the use of teacher’s assistants when they can cost-effectively increase classroom sizes while providing quality education.

All changes have costs and benefits.  In a world of 10% less funding, schools that are able to identify the areas where the greatest cost reductions can be found with the least negative impact will be the ones that best serve their students, teachers and communities.  Schools should reach out to their communities for help in generating solutions to the coming crisis.