Includes bibliographical references and index.

I. Financing public education -- II. Constructing a strategic financial plan -- III. Preparing and administering site-based and district plans.

In the latter part of the 20th century, the financial practices of school districts began to change. Specifically, some of these developments included:
- new accounting and budgeting rules along with stringent accountability demands,
- acknowledgment of the economic importance of education to people and society, which generated measures of effectiveness and efficiency from the national to the local level,
- legal directives from state legislatures and courts that placed new regulations on the distribution of educational money, and
- implementation of new standards for programs to prepare and license school administrators.
Indeed, these and other changes opened the 21st century to a new and shifting perspective on the financing of public schools and new financial skills for school leaders.
In response to these emerging rules, legal directives, standards, and other operating expectations, I developed a conceptual framework over a 12-year period while teaching a school finance course to aspiring school administrators. At the outset, I set a course parameter that future school administrators, as well as the professors who teach a school finance course, although needing a certain fluency with the process, could not be expected to become accountants. This book is a product of that work.