School-Based Budget Reporting System (SBRS), System Migration

The Client

The New York City Board of Education manages the nation’s largest school system—1,100 schools in 5 boroughs—and allocates an annual school budget of more than $10 billion.

The Challenge

Although the New York City School Board had financial management and budget preparation systems, these systems were unable to analyze budget expenditures at the individual school level. Neither policy makers nor parents had access to a detailed breakdown of the board’s $10 billion budget across each of the system’s schools. It was impossible to know what resources were being directed toward classroom instruction, administration, transportation, and so on - at each school, for different types of students and different levels of instruction. In 1995, one of the board’s top priorities became the development of a school-based budget reporting system (SBRS) that would make possible a full accounting of the school system’s spending.

The Solution

Responding to the board’s desire to have the system developed in time to report on the 1995–1996 school year, BearingPoint quickly went to work. In addition to reviewing and confirming technology and data requirements, our consulting team developed a reporting system data model that included:

• The process for extracting, transforming, and loading live data into SBRS from numerous school board systems.
• Rule processes to allow for school-level reporting of all budgeted and actual expenditures/
• A reporting module to allow for multiple reporting levels.

In just seven months, we completed the task of building the SBRS and its database, containing more than 17 million separate records. One of our team’s most significant accomplishments was the migration of the SBRS from a mainframe environment to a Windows NT/Oracle environment. Establishing the system as a complete client/server application resulted in improved system speed and functionality.

The Benefits

In November 1996, Rudy Crew, Chancellor of New York City schools, introduced the city’s first-ever school-based budget reports. The reports provided unprecedented insight into how education dollars were budgeted in New York. These insights included:

• What resources were being directed toward classroom instruction, administration, and transportation at each school, for different types of students and different levels of instruction.
• The level of organizational management and control over the resources.
• Details of the substantial funds that passed through the school budget that were not earmarked for public school children.

In introducing the reports, Chancellor Crew wrote, “The future of every child in our schools depends on our ability to use our money as efficiently and effectively as possible. These school-based budget reports give us a framework to begin assessing how resource decisions relate to student outcomes.”

View/Download the New York City Board of Education case study (21 KB)