Making the Grade: Long-Term Financial Planning for Schools

As school districts continue to be faced with new and complex challenges of longer nature, planning for the long-term is becoming of greater importance. Successfully navigating through these new and complex challenges requires a long-term plan that describes present and future educational needs of the community, actions the school must take to meet these needs, and how these actions will be funded. This paper lays out the The Government Finance Officers Association’s four phrase approach to long-term financing planning; the mobilization phase, the analysis phase, the decision phase and the execution phase.