School Finance Final Reflection

Week 5, Part 3: Final Reflections on Lessons Learned

I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge the school finance course offered me.  Throughout the entire course, I was challenged in many aspects because this is one of the areas that my master’s program did not prepare me as well as I would have liked.  I know that the scopes of the two are totally different, but 95% of the items in this course were new concepts to me.

Competency 8 Self Assessments:

In doing the pre and post self-assessments in regards to school finance, I learned that I was ok in some areas to start with and lacking quite a bit in others.  As I progressed through the course, I was able to strengthen some areas and make progress in others.  I still have a long way to go in order to master all areas of competency 8 and become well versed in the area of finance.

Lectures, interviews, readings, and resources:

All the lectures, interviews, readings and resources offered valuable information that I had to review and utilize in order to complete my assignments and gain knowledge. From the first lecture about the history of school finance to having to look at the summary of finances for different districts, every week more valuable information was presented in a very user friendly format.  This opened my thinking to items I need to be aware of and seek out as I move forward in my career and begin to secure superintendent positions.  The other huge item I learned was that I need to ensure that I have a top notch CFO working alongside me because having a strong CFO will only help ease my worries in the area of school finance. 

Weekly assignments and activities, including information and insights from interviews

At times, our assignments and activities seemed to just be tedious busy work, but as I reflect back, I am glad we were exposed to the activities and required to do what we needed to do.  Short of being in a classroom learning this directly from the teacher, this provided the next best thing.  It seems that all the activities were practical and gave us real life hands-on experience that we can now turn around and utilize in our current positions or as we begin to apply for superintendent positions.  The interviews were always very insightful because the CFO and superintendent were able to expose me to real life situations and documents that are used in everyday business.  They also shared past experiences that were learning experiences for them.  They offered these examples so that I would not repeat some of those same mistakes.

Any other highlights from the course:

Even though I was not too keen on the idea of having to collaborate with a Wiki group to start with, the concept did grow on me and I am very glad we were required to participate.  I formed a good bond with my cohort group and was able to not only bounce school finance questions to them, but just job questions in general. I was also happy to be exposed to so many different financial resources because now I will not feel like I am ignorant about items when they are talked about in my current position.