How To Create a Community Guide to Your School District's Budget. School Finance Toolkit.

This toolkit helps community-based organizations create a community guide to the school budget, demystifying school finance for citizens and engaging them in the process of using the school budget as a tool for school improvement. It explains the major steps organizations have used in their own initiatives, offering advice and examples of tools. It explores major challenges organizations have faced and how they have addressed them. It also presents other resources for finding and analyzing information about school finance. There are five major sections: "Get Started" (setting a mission for the school finance initiative, organizing participants, and finding resources); "Engage the Public" (strategies for engaging the public up front and finding out what citizens want to know about school finance); "Crunch the Numbers" (the nitty-gritty work of creating a community guide to the school budget, with tips on finding, analyzing, and presenting information effectively); "Put the Numbers to Work" (ways to use the information that has been collected as a catalyst for community-wide discussions of school finance and its impact on school quality); and "Resources" (tools used by community-based organizations in their school finance initiatives and references to many data sources). (SM)