Feb

Last year at our annual conference, I posed several questions.

In these tough times of budget reductions resulting from costs increasing at a faster rate than revenue, we look at best practices to help streamline our business operations. One such program is one of MSBO’s products and services – PaySchools.

MSBO Executive Director David Martell and MSBO Associate Director Bob Dwan discuss the Governor's Executive Budget, an upcoming MSBO budget survey, as well as announcing the February  winner of the MSBO Annual Conference drawing.

Punxsutawney Phil emerged just after dawn on Groundhog Day to make his 125th annual weather forecast and predicted an early spring. Well, we don’t believe him and we’ve heard there is another storm heading toward Michigan this weekend.

MSBO’s Student Transportation Benchmarking Survey is intended to build on the 2007 and 2009 surveys by providing school districts with comparative performance metrics and information on best practices in student transportation.

MSBO’s 73rd Annual Conference & Exhibit Show is the best professional development value available to Michigan School Business Officials and vendors who provide us products and services.

The Michigan Department of Education (MDE) is scheduling monitoring reviews for the ARRA ESF and Education Jobs Fund grant programs. Monitoring reviews may be conducted as either an on-site visit or a desk review.

The following grants will be reviewed:

The planning committee for the 2011 MEMSPA Annual Conference, scheduled for December 7-9, 2011 at the Kalamazoo Radisson is accepting breakout session applications.

I came across an article on the Internet recently that originally appeared in USA Today on September 16, 2003. The title of the article was “U.S. tops the world in school spending but not test scores”. The article pointed out that the U.S spends more public and private money on education than other major countries.

As schools continue to struggle with balancing our budgets, the pressures of consolidation and collaboration push us to become creative to “reimagine” the educational system for K-12 students.