Project Description & Analysis

Overview

In this section I describe and analyze the political, social and technical development of the Budget Builder Web site. After a brief summary of the project, I offer two ways to view the information in this section.

Project Overview

The Seattle Public School District initiated a change in their funding mechanisms in the fall of 1996. Through the 1996-97 school year, almost all of each school's resources were determined by the district's central administration. Using a method referred to as "staffing standards," each school's staff—both administration and teachers—was determined centrally, based on the projected number of students. The district proposed to change the resource allocation to a new plan, known as the "Weighted Student Formula" (WSF), which would allocate resources in the form of dollars directly to each school. The dollars would be determined by a formula that allocated different weights to students based on educational characteristics such as grade level, special education level, or poverty level.

The district assumed that this move would create a dramatic change in the process of budgeting at the school level, as well as a dramatic change in the mechanics of creating budgets. Principals would now be responsible for managing budgets orders of magnitude larger than those they previously had to deal with. For example, under the previous system a high school principal might have had discretion over $50,000, while under the new system, she would control $3,000,000. Because of the magnitude of the change, the Seattle Schools administration decided to provide a technical tool to support the principals' new budgeting task. The Budget Builder Web site is that tool.

Joseph Olchefske, the school district's Chief Financial Officer at the time, approached Anne Hallett, Executive Director of the Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform, a community-focused, educational activist group, for assistance in creating the new tool. By chance, Anne met Andrew Gordon, a professor at the University of Washington, on an elevated train platform in Chicago. Andy and Anne have known each other for many years, from when they both worked on community development projects in Chicago. Anne described the Seattle Schools project to Andy and it intrigued him enough to draw him into the project. Upon returning to Seattle, Andy drew me into the project as well.

Nonlinear and Linear Paths

Because a web site is by nature a nonlinear (and typically, dynamic) compilation of information, the most appropriate way to view the commentary about the Budget Builder is by seeing the commentary directly attached to the original site as hypertext links.

However, since a dissertation is usually linear, and since the first sections of this report are also linear, I have provided both nonlinear and linear paths through the Project Description material. I do suggest that one choose the nonlinear option, as that will allow the reader to first see the Budget Builder web site, and then read the commentary. I believe that reading the commentary first, then looking at the Budget Builder site will not be as useful and may possibly be confusing. This Budget Builder Analysis site is designed so that you may switch back and forth between the two paths at any time.

Nonlinear Path

Linear Path

Overview | Nonlinear Path | Linear Path

Contents | Introduction | Background | Methods | Description | Conclusion | References