School Wise Press SARC Services

SARC BITE 33 | MARCH 10, 2006

What Is the Real Cost of Your SARCs and What Do You Have to Show For It?

Accountability reporting is getting more demanding and more expensive. The four-page SARCs of 1995 seem quaint in comparison to the 16-page documents of today. Last year, the Williams legislation added hours of work to the job of reporting new facts about facilities, teachers and textbooks. This year, Senate Bill 687 will add hours more work to cataloging career-technical education and calculating teachers' actual salaries and actual expenditures at the school site level.

It is time to get realistic about what all this work costs, and time to get practical about the benefits your district, your schools and your public derive from your reporting. If reporting schools' results in SARCs costs a lot, and will cost more as requirements escalate, you should be able to put those reports to work producing a real return on your investment.

Here is part one of a two-part look at the cost and benefits of accountability reporting. (Now that SARC reimbursements have formally ended, this may be a good time to begin paying closer attention to real costs.)

SARC COST COMPONENTS

In seven years of asking education leaders what their districts pay to produce their schools' annual reports, we have heard only two answers in reply. Either were told, "I don't really know." Or we're told, "It doesn't cost us anything. Hazel, our department assistant, does them and she works here already."

The person who doesn't know the cost is too far from the budget to think about it. But the person who thinks it doesn't cost the district anything has forgotten that if people are getting paid for their work, it costs the district plenty. Direct costs are the proportional share of the gross salary of the people doing the job, plus the cost of their benefits and deferred compensation (post-retirement health benefits or pensions, for example). If an admin assistant spends 20 workdays out of a 180 day work year on SARCs, her cost is one-ninth of her salary, benefits and deferred compensation. That's just the first layer of cost. Then there's the cost of overhead -- a desk, electricity, heat, a computer, tech support, and more.

But those of you who are SARC liaisons aren't the only ones hard at work making these reports possible. (At the end of this newsletter, you may be surprised to discover how much everyone's contribution to SARCs really costs.)

Your principals spend time writing their portion of the SARC, as well as reading and reviewing the data definitions. Someone in your team has to read what principals write, and edit their comments and occasionally correct their spelling, grammar and punctuation. If you're careful, someone also checks the factual accuracy of their claims of progress.

Your curriculum and instruction person will spend time this year describing the career-technical program in all its glory—courses offered, the programs they belong to, and more.

Your human resources director faces many hours of work answering the Williams-related questions about teacher misassignments and vacancies for the current and two prior years. If you have high schools, your HR folks will also have to calculate out-of-field teaching. (And if you think defining a misassignment or vacancy is easy, try reading the data definitions.) Your HR team should also review and approve the pre-populated data in the credentials and NCLB portion of the teacher section of each schools SARC.

The staff in charge of your student information system must extract suspension and expulsion data. Special program enrollment might also come directly from your SIS person.

Your testing and assessment team is the source for data on other measures of student achievement. This could be your writing exams or other local benchmarks. The testing and assessment team should also review the data on the CST and CAT/6 results to assure that they match your records, school by
school.

Your business services director has the difficult task of determining the cost of each school's actual expenditures in the prior fiscal year. Average teacher salary by site must also be reported this year. These requirements are new, called for by Senate Bill 687. You may hear screams emerging from the business services office as they try to tease direct and indirect school site expenditures out of their standardized accounting code structure (SACS).

Your technology team must turn the documents into secure reports that cannot be altered, and present them in either HTML or PDF format. The tech team must also make a home for SARCs in the district's site architecture, and determine where in the structure the links appear. Then the tech folks must place those links in position on each page. If every school is to have links to SARCs, then each school's page needs the links placed there, of course.

Your print shop people will invest time in printing SARCs for distribution. Some districts send printed copies to school sites. Others provide a copy to be given to each student and staff member. But printing is a must according to federal guidelines. (See link to USDoE guidelines at the end of this newsletter.)

Your district's legal counsel should review the SARCs to make sure they conform to the requirements of federal and state laws and policies. There are four dimensions to compliance: content, dissemination, language equity and understandability. It is not as simple as paint-by-numbers, fill-in-the-blanks.

Finally, your board must review and approve your SARCs every other year. All board members have reading to do, and a resolution to discuss and vote upon. This, too, takes time.

If you want to help summarizing everyone's participation in creating your schools' SARCs, you might appreciate this handy spreadsheet: SARC cost calculator from School Wise Press.

STATEWIDE ESTIMATES OF SARC COSTS

The last year for which the Commission on Mandates granted reimbursements for SARCs revealed that just over $11 million was claimed. On average, reimbursement claims covered about two-thirds of the actual cost insofar as districts tracked them. And you can be sure that very few districts logged the time of everyone who contributed to SARCs.

Let's assume for the moment that district cost-claims were accurate and complete. Let's also assume that reimbursement claims were filed for about 8,100 of the 9,000+ K–12 schools in the state. (This allows for districts that didn't file reimbursement claims, and for districts that didn't complete SARCs at all—a fudge factor of 10 percent.) This means that about $15 million was spent by districts producing SARCs for about 8,100 schools.

The cost per school, based on these assumptions: $2,027. It is more than most districts think they spend. Isn't it time you looked at the real cost of creating real reports that real people should be seeing, reading, and discussing?

Next issue: a look at the return-on-investment that SARCs should and can provide.

RECOMMENDATIONS

1. If you are spending a lot for something, figure out how to get good value back. Grumping about the cost of compliance is not going to help you answer this practical question.

2. Take stock of what you're really spending now. If you don't account for everyone's time, you're underestimating real costs. Look at the value of each person's time contributing to the reports. And look at the fully-loaded cost of their time: salary, benefits and deferred compensation.

3. Measure your reach. If your SARCs are online, you can count the number of site visitors who click on your documents. If you have this statistic, you can calculate the cost-per-parent-reached. The more you reach, the higher your effectiveness, and the lower your cost-per-parent. If you print your SARCs, you can survey parents in some schools to estimate what portion of them saw their schools' SARCs, read it, and understood it.

4. Read the UCLA law school study that analyzed the effectiveness of the SARC template when it is used as publishing format. Half the districts in the state are using it this way, although it was never intended for this purpose. The study will open your eyes to the obstacles that diminish the usefulness of the report to the public and your staff.

REFERENCES

The U.S. Dept. of Education's guidance on accountability reporting. See Section A-3 for their warning that online reports alone are not sufficient.

UCLA study of the effectiveness of the template as a report format.

Senate Bill 687 guidelines from the SARC unit of the CDE.

School Wise Press cost calculator for estimating your district's investment in SARCs.