Within the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Cleveland college district was staring down a possible monetary disaster. The nationwide financial system was tanking, COVID chaos was mounting in faculties, and the district’s 10-year funding levy was headed for a dangerous public vote.
Failure to resume and improve the levy, value roughly $65 million, would imply closing or consolidating 25 faculties, slashing funding for sports activities and extracurriculars, and eliminating some educational assist applications for struggling college students.
Derek Richey, the chief monetary officer, gritted his tooth and set to work, making a doomsday plan to chop almost 12 % of the district’s $1.5 billion funds and lay off 675 staff, if the levy failed.
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However because it seems, Richey didn’t want to make use of his worst-case situation. Thanks partially to his efforts, the levy handed, and the direst predictions in regards to the financial system and a corresponding fiscal disaster for districts didn’t materialize. His meticulous planning and management, nevertheless, helped make sure that Cleveland is on sound fiscal footing to climate any future monetary storm.
Richey, 42, is a uncommon breed of faculty district CFO, one who has expanded the position past the quotidian duties of the standard college enterprise official to make sure that principals, lecturers, college students, and educational and nonacademic applications are central to the district’s monetary calculus. He doesn’t merely make sure that there are line-item allocations for applications; Richey collaborates with building-level educators and division heads about what most closely fits their wants.
That collaborative strategy, together with transferring past the standard quantity crunching, has earned Richey each native and nationwide reward.
“Our prior CFOs, they have been all good bookkeepers, however they didn’t contribute to, ‘How is spending this cash altering achievement, assembly a technique?’ They left that to the tutorial individuals,” mentioned Eric Gordon, Cleveland’s superintendent.
Classes From the Chief
- Work Throughout Departments: Efficient change requires possession in any respect ranges. “Good concepts” turn into “nice concepts carried out nicely” while you embrace these most educated and affected within the planning and decisionmaking course of. Management isn’t discovered on a enterprise card or an org. chart. There are such a lot of heroes throughout college programs, in any respect ranges. Discover them, thank them, and empower them.
- Get a Seat on the Desk: When you aren’t already, be a part of strategy-making. Your experience and mindset are vital. You possibly can add worth by specializing in funding planning, monitoring, and sustainability. The way in which we take into consideration return on funding and long-term planning is effective and, when integrated with educational planning, can result in impactful and sustainable outcomes for college kids.
- Keep True to Your imaginative and prescient and Technique: When issues get powerful, there’s stress to alter course or pause. Have the ability to envision a distinct future with out shedding the flexibility to flexibly and adaptively make tactical, day-to-day selections that align to it.
Hoa Truong, a marketing consultant who has recognized Richey professionally since they crossed paths in 2013 at a Broad Middle fellowship program for budding college leaders, agreed.
“He’s all the time centered on how do they assume strategically in regards to the {dollars} that they handle inside Cleveland, how do they finest assist the issues that want essentially the most assist,” Truong mentioned. “It looks like form of a fundamental factor, however I might not say that’s the norm.”
Serving to the district discover its footing
Cleveland has been close to the brink earlier than. In the beginning of the 2010s, solely 30 % of the district’s 44,000 college students have been proficient in math, the vast majority of its conventional public and constitution faculties have been among the many lowest-performing in Ohio, and nearly half of excessive schoolers have been graduating in 4 years.
The town’s broader financial fortunes have been additionally on shaky floor, as the continuing exodus of producing jobs from the town was compounded by a pointy rise in foreclosures and financial hardship following the Nice Recession. In 2014, 58 % of the town’s kids have been dwelling in poverty.
The college district is now almost a decade into the Cleveland Plan, a bundle of reforms carried out in 2012, partially to stop a state takeover. Underneath the plan, the district dedicated to increasing high-performing faculties, closing failing faculties, shifting funds and governance decisionmaking from the district to principals, and thoroughly monitoring progress on commencement charges and different key educational metrics.
The plan, coupled with sturdy management from prime directors, has put Cleveland’s faculties on a notable upswing.
The district’s funds have improved as nicely. Whilst state help tied to declining enrollment continues to be a problem, the levy displays the general public’s renewed confidence within the system’s capacity to spend assets correctly.
We’re going to take the chance to put the wager and say, ‘If we will present a greater expertise, we expect we can entice and retain extra college students.’
Derek Richey
Richey, who had been a key a part of that turnaround, is fast to share credit score along with his colleagues for the enhancements and factors to the groundwork laid earlier than he arrived in 2015. After 4 years within the CFO position and 7 general with the district, he’s intensely invested in enhancing college students’ experiences and seeing initiatives by.
That was the case final yr when the district needed to buy expertise in step with a brand new technique to reinforce scholar engagement. Richey selected Clevertouch, an interactive show that might grasp on the wall of every classroom and allow educators and college students to jot down and draw digitally for the entire class to see. Every gadget prices $2,500, with the whole topping $10 million, together with set up—“an excessive amount of cash to spend with out a plan,” Richey mentioned.
As an alternative of shopping for the shows and sending them to lecture rooms, the place some would seemingly sit untouched, he recognized a handful of lecturers who have been already utilizing them and requested them to decide on colleagues who would function good check topics.
“This could additionally permit us to work out any kinks with early adopters,” Richey mentioned.
His closest collaborators say this type of calm, proactive analysis is one in every of his core strengths.
“He approaches issues with a curiosity that I feel is admittedly wholesome,” Gordon mentioned.
Implementing new applications to counterpoint college students’ lives
Richey spots alternative in crises.
Eight months into the pandemic, he and colleagues rallied the town’s voters to resume the tax levy, even because the financial turmoil of the pandemic’s prevaccine period was exacerbating poverty within the space, in keeping with a 2020 report from the Ohio Affiliation of Group Motion Businesses.
Underneath Richey’s watch, the district is utilizing the levy, in addition to the three rounds of federal COVID-19 help, to implement initiatives Cleveland had been sitting on for years.
“What our youngsters have been getting earlier than is simply not adequate,” he mentioned. “We’re going to take the chance to put the wager and say, ‘If we will present a greater expertise, we expect we can entice and retain extra college students,’ and the group will see the worth and assist it with their tax {dollars}.”
Richey’s workforce has hit the bottom operating on every part from an up to date pay scale for athletic division staff to a brand new budget-visualization strategy that ensures faculties can see all of the monetary assets out there to them at any given time.
In latest months, he helped spearhead an effort to alter bell schedules and transportation plans for elementary and center faculties. The aim was to go from an eight-period day to a 10-period day, with all lecturers at work for 9 consecutive durations. The primary and final durations supply enrichment for college kids who need to choose up a further course in bodily schooling, arts, or music.
The plan providing extra enriching applications for college kids emerged from contract negotiations with the lecturers’ union in March final yr.
However when it was time to place it into motion months later, nobody in district management appeared out there to take it on—besides Richey.
“I used to be enthusiastic about it in order that’s helped,” he mentioned.
He met with fellow district leaders, the humanities director, the transportation workforce, and principals to debate how the transformation would work. The collaboration benefited immensely from the robust relationships Richey had cultivated throughout his tenure.
Richey and the district’s transportation director, Eric Taylor, had contemplated altering the bus schedules years in the past in order that extra buses would have the ability to drop off college students at three faculties throughout a single bus run. On the time, solely 15 % of the buses hit the mark. Now, with the modifications Richey and Taylor spearheaded, 85 % of buses hit three faculties in a single run.
“He understood that the best way this was going to work was if college of us, curriculum of us, the content material of us centrally, transportation—if all of them collaborated and labored collectively, they might determine a set of issues that faculty principals would need to do that truly have been good and grounded in good content material and that have been cost-effective,” mentioned Jonathan Travers, a accomplice on the Massachusetts-based college finance consulting agency Training Useful resource Methods, which works with districts together with Cleveland on equitable-spending approaches.
“He’s actually a bridge-builder, which is usually a singular high quality in finance.”
Cleveland faculties are actually providing enrichment programs in additional than 70 matters, as huge ranging as African drumming and excessive health to jewellery making and musical theater.
Roughly 3,000 college students, or 13 % of the district’s Okay-8 enrollment, are already taking part in these applications. Travers marvels on the district’s success pulling off a brand new program whereas attempting to maintain each day operations afloat as in-person college returned this fall.
“The trail of least resistance while you’re already managing a disaster is to not have to alter,” Travers mentioned. “It’s fairly superb that they’ve largely pulled this off at scale.”
A push for reform sparks a ardour for schooling
Richey’s Okay-12 profession started in 2008, whereas he was working at a well being care IT firm and dwelling in Kansas Metropolis, Mo.
After the start of his daughter, many pals and acquaintances assumed he’d be crossing state strains to Kansas Metropolis, Kan., the place the faculties have a greater fame than their counterparts in Missouri.
He discovered that notion irritating. After stumbling upon an advert soliciting candidates for 2 college board vacancies on the Missouri facet, he utilized with the hope of enhancing the fame of the town’s faculties. He was chosen to fill one of many seats and efficiently received reelection two years later.
“Fairly fortuitous that free, promotional newspaper confirmed up on that day,” mentioned Richey, who served on the board from 2008 to 2012.
He shortly embraced the problem of creating substantial modifications from throughout the system and ultimately realized he needed his night time job to turn into his day job.
“After I joined the board, we had like 1,000 board insurance policies, all the way down to trivialities ranges of figuring out what the superintendent and his workforce ought to do,” Richey mentioned. “After I left, we had a very revised set of insurance policies that have been centered on the expectations of what we needed the district to attain for teenagers.”
In 2012, he moved to the Metro Nashville Public Colleges in Tennessee, the place, because the district’s director of innovation, he helped steer extra assets into the palms of principals.
That work drew the eye of Gordon, who recruited Richey in 2015 as govt director of budgets and grants. When the district’s chief monetary officer retired in 2017, Richey stepped up.
Cleveland was just a few years faraway from the town authorities’s formation of the Cleveland Plan, enrollment was dropping, and scholar poverty was endemic. However Richey noticed the glass as half full: a extra cooperative board than he’d beforehand encountered and a few robust optimistic momentum on commencement charges and equitable spending amongst faculties.
Now, two years right into a public-health disaster that retains throwing new curveballs in school districts, Richey finds himself within the unlikely place of telling his colleagues to fret much less about cash than they usually do, so long as they’re assured their investments will repay for college kids.
“You’ve obtained to shake them unfastened a bit of bit,” he mentioned. “Having the CFO say, ‘Severely, spend the cash, dream large, don’t fear about the associated fee’—that’s a extremely liberating factor.”