Educational technology budgets continue to be a challenge, especially with so many schools’ finances stretched thin to start. In many cases there aren’t many concrete practices to create, maintain, and update budgets to make sure funds are being used in the best ways possible.
Here we speak with Frank Murray, Director of Instructional Technology and Campus Support for Belton ISD in Belton, Texas, about the best practices schools and districts can use to help efficiently improve their technology budgets.
Weighing Your Educational Needs
In understanding how to leverage an educational technology budget, knowing what your school or district needs is important. This can help you make informed decisions during a tech audit, a budget revision, or at the end of a budget cycle. It can also reveal areas in which you may be spending too much on individual tools and programs that could be eating into your budget.
“The hardest thing is how do you make data-driven decisions on what you’re using in the school,” says Murray. “The main thing to us is usage results. What are our usage reports on devices? We use a piece of software that tells us exactly how many times a kid has logged [into a device] and how long they were there. How long they stay and whether they were on task with it. And we break that down.”
With this kind of information, Murray says schools can create realistic expectations about where the money needs to go and whether existing uses of the budget should continue or be altered.
What Obstacles Should You Prepare For?
When it comes to spending, having a clear objective in mind for your budget outcome can help you circumvent many obstacles. Focusing on services that handle similar tasks might be able to help you identify the ones you want to keep and the ones that you can stop using.
For example, Murray says, “We had three hall pass softwares for student’s digital hall passes. It tracks where they are. We had three different vendor names, three different companies for three different softwares that did the same thing. So you lose buying power there. So when you get everyone on one system, it would be cheaper for us as a district.”
Making fiscally responsible decisions on what software to allot your current budget is important, as is planning for the future.
“We should never sign on to a software or a subscription that we do not plan to use for at least three years,” Murray says. “We should have vetted the software to the point that we know it is something that we need. It’s not something that we are trying out, it’s something we need now and this is the problem it’s going to solve. So we started doing multiyear deals on a lot of our software contracts that saved between five and 20 percent.”
What happens when a vendor you want to contract for three years wants all the money upfront for the contract?
“For those who need it all upfront, we looked at financing,” Murray says. “Even with the financing, we were still able to save 20 percent on a lot of our deals. So we’re financing three years. The finance companies are paying it upfront. We’re paying the payment companies.”
How To Get the Most Out of Your Vendor Negotiations
As an educational decision-maker, it can be difficult to know whether a vendor has your best interests at heart or if they just want to make a sale. Murray suggests that before you enter into negotiations with a vendor for their services, you do your due diligence and come prepared.
“Enter negotiations with a clear understanding of your budget,” says Murray. “Know your desired outcomes and your potential alternatives. We need to research [this service] heavily before we know that this is something we will use for a while. Tell the vendors what you have to spend. That’s the kicker. You have to build a relationship with your vendors. You have to help them understand what’s going on with your budget constraints. Let them know exactly what you can afford.”
Having a firm understanding of your budget will not only help you in your negotiations with your vendors, it will also help vendors understand how they can best serve you. Vendors and educators are in this together, and having a high level of communication can benefit both sides when it comes to educational technology and budget management.
