The folks at Allovue, the providers of the budget management system used by Hartford Public Schools, for which they paid $317,000 for a 3-year license in 2020 at a virtual-only meeting on March 24, state that “Site Based” or “School Based” Management systems in school districts is a growing trend.

Allovue states:

“It’s commonly believed that the central office is best positioned to make the determination of what resources each school needs in a given school year.  However, we’re starting to see more and more districts move away from this practice by decentralizing resources to site-level leaders and allow for decisions to be made by those most closely in tune with the needs of students in a specific school.”

And then, of course, there is Hartford Public Schools.

Over the last 7 years, the budget for central office services has grown by 24%, while the total budgets for Hartford schools grew by 14% over those 7 years. Hardly a shift from a centralized, authoritarian form of district management to a district management system shared with the hands and the hearts of educators.

To arrive at the above numbers, I used the published data in HPS’ Budget Books, accessed in the Budget Document Library.    I compared data from the budget for 2017-18, with the data from the 2023-24 budget.

Naturally, the public issue of the budget does not contain a line item that states, “This is the budget for Central Office.”  HPS is like that, transparent as window tint.

And since I do not work for HPS and do not want to pull a Watergate on their offices, I used the published budget books and, admittedly, some creativity to come up with some numbers.

Every budget page which listed something that was called the “Office of…” or the “Department of…,” I pegged for being part of the central office services budget.  Each school listed in the budget books has its own page with the requested or approved budget amount for that particular school.  Outside of these 2 categories, are the school services costs, such as transportation, security, maintenance, etc.

The table below represents the budgets for each category for the years 2017-18 and 2023-24, while also showing the growth (or decline) for each over the 7-year span.

The table below shows the chart of accounts for which I used to obtain the Central Services amounts.

The table below shows the percentage of the district’s total budget that each category grabs and holds onto like it’s a piece of pie in an Oliver Twist novel.