We sat down with Nicole Conley, LINQ board member, Managing Director at Siebert Williams Shank, and former Chief Finance, Business and Operations Officer at Austin ISD. She navigated some of the most resource-constrained environments in public education, and she’s realistic about what districts face today. Here’s what she had to say for the sixth and final post in this series.
Doing more with less has been the motto of school finance for so long it barely registers anymore. But the conditions behind it have never been more severe. Budgets aren’t just tight, they’re structurally strained. And the decisions for K-12 CFOs inside that constraint have never been harder.
Nicole Conley doesn’t reach for optimistic language when she describes the current state of K-12 finance. She keeps it very real. She’s watched the pressure build across every state for decades, and she’s watched the many of the legacy tools they relied on fail to keep pace.
The Reality Is Brutal
“To say school budgets are tight gives them more wiggle room than they actually have.”
Nicole says school district CFOs have seen every cubic inch of breathing room squeezed out of their budgets. She points to a specific and sobering data point in Texas: districts have absorbed roughly 25% in inflation with no meaningful update to the state’s basic per-pupil allotment. The formula that determines how much money flows to schools hasn’t kept pace with the cost of running them, and the gap between what it costs to educate and feed a child and what the state provides has been widening for years.
It plays out the same way every time:
- Costs go up, like salaries, utilities, supplies, insurance, and technology
- Revenue stays flat or declines as enrollment shifts
- The difference gets absorbed by cutting people and programs
- The cuts land somewhere that kept a student engaged
Nicole is direct about what that means in practice: “You have to cut staff or programs in order to satisfy the new cost of doing business today. Sometimes both. And that’s insurmountable.”
The Competitive Pressure Nobody Saw Coming
“School districts have to become more competitive. They have to make their environments more appealing for students and families, which is really shifting the way they allocate resources.”
Nicole points out that throughout most of public education’s history, enrollment was largely guaranteed. Students went to the school in their neighborhood, and districts planned around that assumption.
Today, charter schools, micro schools, private school voucher programs, and open enrollment policies make K-12 a competitive market. Districts have to actively make the case that they’re the right choice for families. That means directing budget into programs and learning opportunities that make families want to enroll their students.
The days of stable enrollment and predictable revenue are over for most of the country. CFOs now manage a shrinking and increasingly competitive resource base while being asked to deliver more.
Maximizing Every Dollar Is the Mission
“Take a dollar, squeeze a dollar, and make it holler. My grandmother taught me that. In K-12 finance right now, that’s not a saying. It’s a survival strategy.”
That phrase, handed down from Nicole’s grandmother, captures the moral urgency of K-12 financial stewardship. Every dollar that gets wasted, duplicated, or lost to inefficiency is a dollar that didn’t reach a student.
Nicole spent her career trying to close that gap. She looked at every operational inefficiency as a resource question: what could this dollar do instead?
At LINQ, We’re Built for the Constraint
LINQ ERP and LINQ Payments are built for the operational reality Nicole describes: a K-12 environment where every dollar has to work harder and every system has to run more efficiently, so every hour of staff time saved can go toward students.
LINQ is built to help CFOs squeeze every dollar on behalf of students and communities served with better tools, cleaner data, and one less source of friction standing between a great finance team and the mission they’re there to support.
Need to generate more flexible funds to cover gaps in your budget?
Find out how activity funds can be the key to financial freedom for you K-12 school district. From clubs and special events to Friday night football games, maximizing revenue is all about closing the small gaps that add up over the course of a school year. We cover it all in this webinar with a former K-12 principal who turned activity funds into more student opportunities.