Wellesley Public Schools, Massachusetts
A Top Rated School Districts Uses Benchmarking Transparency to Justify Complex Budget Expenditures

Primary Objective

Build a Clear, Community-Focused Budget Within Resource Constraints

To build an annual budget for Wellesley Public Schools that meets the needs of the community and fits within the constraints of available resources.

Challenge

Complex Budget Process With Many Stakeholders and Constraints

Building a school budget is a complex project that involves guidance from a wide range of stakeholders; the need to prioritize requests from a variety of staff members; multiple presentations and working meetings; and ultimately a series of votes before the months long process is completed.

“We face a number of challenges throughout the process,” says Wellesley Superintendent, Dr. David Lussier. “We need to take into account non-discretionary increases (such as those coming from collective bargaining agreements); help the public understand our legal obligations with respect to special education expenditures and reconcile our budget in the context of overall town revenue growth.”

ClearGov helped make our budget presentations more effective by consolidating dense financial information into clear, concise concepts that everyone could understand.

Dr. David Lussier, Superintendent for Wellesley Public Schools

Solution

Clear, Comparative Budget Insights Through Transparency

Wellesley Public Schools knew there had to be a better way to easily communicate the complexities of the budget in a simple, readable format. ClearGov Transparency was an important part of the solution.

Lussier claims, “ClearGov delivers easily accessible, comparative benchmark data that enabled us to show how different segments of our budget were actually very reasonable requests, and the historical data quickly showed our longitudinal trends over time.”

ClearGov delivers complex data in an intuitive and easily digestible format. “The feedback we received was quite positive,” says Dr. Lussier. “It was particularly helpful to be able to show that our district leadership and administration expenses – never popular categories – are actually well below most of our peers.”

Our senior administrative team now uses ClearGov Transparency as a tool in our internal planning and program assessment process.

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