School Wise Press SARC Services

Next Year’s Forecast:
Less Money, More Work, Faster SARCs

NUMBER 40 | APRIL 15, 2008

The challenge for those with SARC responsibilities is going to be tougher next year. The law calls for a February 1, 2009 publication date. Consequently, you must publish your schools’ SARCs faster, and oh, by the way, you’re likely to have fewer staff in the district office to shoulder the job, thanks to the cutbacks the legislature and the governor are now debating. Faster SARCs will require doing more with less, since a job that often takes six months must now be done in three to four months.

Doing more with less was a way of life for our parents’ generation, who lived through the Depression and the rationing imposed by World War II. They were proud of their frugality, and some retained their resourceful habits well into the Era of Excess, when waste was built into products, when savings were “out” and borrowing was “in.” My mother was a curmudgeonly conservationist who saved aluminum foil, string, and rubber bands until the day she died. She reused paper bags. She recycled bottles before it was fashionable, and she enjoyed repairing appliances that her friends would have thrown away. She made soup out of vegetables that were less than perfect, and she saved chicken bones for soup stock. These life habits, formed in years of hardship, were for her a virtue.

When Jerry Brown ran for governor in 1982, he embraced the Era of Limits. He drove an old Buick and shunned the governor’s mansion, preferring a modest apartment close to the Capitol. His years in the seminary may have accustomed him to the ascetic life, but his frugality was consistent with his father’s generation. The voters rewarded Jerry Brown’s modest materialism (and his policies and appointments) with a thumbs down at the polls.

Well, Jerry Brown’s Era of Limits has returned. Frugality is coming into fashion, so it’s a perfect time to get bold and do more with less. This is California’s future, and it pertains as much to ending wasteful habits with water and power as it does to ending wasteful use of public dollars to run schools. Tightening up is the theme in every district. Your leadership is tightening up in the way it manages employee benefits, evaluates instructional programs, and runs buses. It’s a great time for you to contribute to reducing waste in the way you publish SARCs.

Here are three suggestions which we’re ready to share from our own list of School Wise Press “best practices.” We’ve developed them over the course of nine years of accountability reporting, and we tip our hat to the clients whose initiative and intelligent suggestions have helped us.

RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Start working on SARCs earlier, preferably in May. Your principals will have an easier time revising their writing about the year they’ve just finished if you ask them to do so before they pack up for the summer. The natural point to sum up your year is in the ten days after students and teachers have gone home.

2. Eliminate the waste of waiting, and treat your SARC reports like a perishable fruit. This just-in-time publishing system is in keeping with the public’s expectation. They know that annual reports are a perishable information product. Like an apple, they are best when served closest to harvest. Fresh information trumps stale information. When you delay publishing information on teacher credentials or your principals’ writing because you are waiting for physical fitness data, you are wasting the value of providing fresh information.

3. Decide what return on investment your leadership wants from its SARC reporting. And then measure your results. Even if your leadership expects SARCs to simply meet a compliance requirement, you can satisfy federal requirements only by putting your SARCs in parents’ hands to read. You could measure how early you published the first installment of your SARCs. Your goal could be to have something ready for Back-to-School Nights. You might measure how many printed SARC reports you’ve distributed to parents. Perhaps an easier and more effective result is to measure the number of SARC reports that are read. Because your documents are published on your district’s Web site, your technology team can easily count the number of times a digital document (PDF) has been opened. Given the belief among many district leaders that SARCs are not read by the public, here’s a way to put evidence on the table and see whether this belief is true.

At School Wise Press, we are counting the number of reports read at the school and district level, as well as the type of report read. We are reporting to our clients the type of report that is read (executive summaries or the complete SARCs) and, for hot topics like Williams settlement-related information or school finances, we’re also able to report levels of online readership. This feedback is revealing that district leaders have usually been incorrect in assuming that few citizens read their reports. The good news (and you may discover this in your district) is that, in fact, tens of thousands of reports are being read. The average district among our 100-plus clients is seeing report-reading activity equivalent to about 30 percent of its enrollment in the period from July 2007 through February 2008.

CONCLUSION

In brief, in tough times like these, your SARCs should work harder. You can make this happen by starting your SARC publishing cycle to earlier, by publishing your SARCs faster, and by measuring your results. If you develop a new approach, share it with us and we’ll share it with other SARC liaisons who read SARC BITES.