The Principal’s Guide to School Budgeting 3rd Edition by Richard D. Sorenson, ISBN-13: 978-1506389455

• Format: PDF
• Publisher: ‎ Corwin; Third edition (December 27, 2017)
• Language: ‎ English
• ‎352 pages
• ISBN-10: ‎ 1506389457
• ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1506389455

The third edition is purposefully written for practicing and aspiring public and private school administrators who want to enhance their instructional, technical, and managerial skills not only as the school’s leader but also as the school’s visionary, planning coordinator, and budgeting manager. The authors provide the reader with an essential understanding of the interwoven relationship between two independent yet distinctly connected accountability systems—academic and fiscal.

School leaders—from a financial and budgetary perspective—are responsible for understanding the equity issues and fiscal consequences associated with school budgeting as well as the relationship between educational goal development and resource allocation management. The authors provide school leaders with an overview of school budgeting practices within a collaborative decision-making context. Using school-oriented situations and the national standards for administrators as they relate to school leadership and budgeting, the reader acquires the necessary skills to plan and develop a budget; allocate, expend, and monitor funds; manage and evaluate budget reports; and prepare school action or improvement plans aligned with a fiscal accountability system.

To improve the book’s usefulness as a desk resource, it has been purposely organized into brief, single-topic–focused chapters. Each chapter begins with an appropriate quote and general overview and includes numerous visuals, tables, and relevant activities, such as utilizing accounting codes, projecting student populations, conducting a needs assessment, implementing a budget calendar, and building, defending, and amending a budget.

New enhancements to this third edition include an overview of how national and state reform practices are affecting school allocations, the inclusion of the newly adopted Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL), updated statistical information and relevant budgetary materials and vignettes, a technology overview and how it affects budgetary practices in this digital age, a new section on school fraud and credit card abuse, crowdfunding, and how school funds can be misappropriated if the school leader is not readily focused and engaged in the budgetary process. Additionally, technology-oriented/budgeting screenshots are included within this new edition.

Richard D. Sorenson, Professor Emeritus, is the former department chairperson of the Educational Leadership and Foundations Department at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). He also served as the director of the Principal Preparation Program. He earned his doctorate from Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi in educational leadership. Dr. Sorenson served public schools for 25 years as a social studies teacher, principal, and associate superintendent for human resources.

Dr. Sorenson continues to work with graduate students at UTEP teaching school-based budgeting and school personnel. He was named The University of Texas at El Paso College of Education Professor of the Year (2005), and he remains an active writer with numerous professional journal publications. Dr. Sorenson has authored textbooks, teacher resource guides, and workbooks related to elementary and secondary social studies curricula. He conducts workshops at the state and national levels, and he has been actively involved in numerous professional organizations, including the Texas Elementary Principals and Supervisors Association (TEPSA), and the Texas Association of Secondary School Principals (TASSP), for which he conducted annual new-principal academy workshops the previous 12-years.