Help sweep up the budget dust

Money will buy a pretty good dog, but it won't buy the wag of its tail.
                                                                               - Josh Billings

As counterintuitive as it sounds, the end of the school year is a good time to ask for money. Your principal just may have some budget dust that s/he needs help spending.

Budget dust is made up of those small amounts of "emergency" funds we all keep in our accounts through the school year. A wise policy. But as all good bureaucrats know, any budget that is not completely spent in a given year faces the real possibility of being reduced the next. So eventually even emergency funds need to be used.

Most schools' fiscal years run from July 1 to June 30. That means any purchases coming from a particular year's budget need to be paid for prior to June 30. Sooooo, you may have an administrator looking for positive ways to expend the remainder of some budgets. Can you provide a list of needed items, a rationale for each, and guaranteed speedy acquisition? Things like:

• digital camera
• locally puchased high interest books
• a document camera
• a Netbook for check out
• a new check out scanner
• a stock of projector lamps

You get the idea. Small, targeted, needed. Ask.

Doesn't being helpful feel good?

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I am one of the few sick people who sort of enjoy doing budgeting and then writing and speaking about it.

My fixation came when as a building librarian one of my book orders was once rejected by the school's business office because of a "lack of funds" in the library account. Happily, I have always kept my own set of spending records. Using these and working with the business mangager, we found a bunch of PE equipment had been, ahem, accidentally coded to my library account. Lesson learned about accurate record keeping.

Anywho, if you are interested, some oldie, but moldie articles/columns on library and technology budgeting...

• Budgeting for Lean Mean Times, MultiMedia Schools Nov/Dec 1995 (Library Budgeting)
• Fight the Zero-Sum Game Interactive Educator, Winter 2006. (Tech Budgeting)
• Sustainable Technology np, 1997
• Giving and Taking, October 1996