ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of how budgets are built, with some attention to how money is directed to individual schools. The primary purpose of a budget is to translate educational priorities into programmatic and financial terms; as such, the budget is the fiscal expression of the educational philosophy of the school district. Line-item budgeting has been widely used for many years to assign differing amounts to each line of the budget. In line-item budgeting, emphasis is placed on the specific objects for which funds are spent. Percentage add-on budgeting is a fairly simplistic model that uses the prior year’s expenditures as a base for creating the next year’s budget. The advent of zero-based budgeting in schools coincided with fiscal problems that began to surface during the high inflation years of the 1970s. Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Evaluation Systems arose from a realization that the budget should be more clearly tied to the educational program.
