2009 was not a great year for anyone — and school districts were no exception. Schools nationwide, from California to New Jersey to Michigan, fell victim to massive budget cuts on both the city and state level. Teachers were laid off and forced to take pay cuts, and funding for facilities and facilities management leveled off if it did not decrease, or disappear altogether.
Unfortunately, 2010-11 does not seem to look any brighter for education, writes Dana Chivvis:
Though the federal government has increased its contribution to education budgets around the country, the extra funds haven’t been enough to get many states out of the red. And because most education budgets get about half of their funding from property taxes, this particular economic downturn has been doubly hard on schools.
But there is a silver lining among all of this budget-slashing, she says. School districts can take advantage of this extreme belt tightening by taking a good, hard look at current processes and finding new ways to operate and be more effcient moving forward. School reform just might be a positive result from all of this, other experts agree.
Though implementation of some new technologies will have to be put on hold because of lack of funding, there are others that just might make it through. Relatively low-cost solutions for classroom scheduling and facilities management are prime for cash-strapped schools, as these low-maintenance systems can help schools maximize the resources they still do have — actual physical classrooms, auditoriums, administrative meeting rooms, and the like.
Particularly at the university level, large-scale campus scheduling is highly important. The University of Tennessee, for instance, worked with us to utilize NetSimplicity’s campus scheduling software to implement an end-to-end room reservation system that integrates access, security and scheduling into one seamless system — thus saving the time and money it would have taken to use three separate technologies. (Read the full story in our University of Tennessee case study.)
Find out more about NetSimplicity’s classroom scheduling and facilities management software and discover how your school could achieve new efficiencies, making the most out of the limited budget that you have.
*Image courtesy of Kevin Dooley
