Page 30 - School Planning & Management, October 2017

BUSINESS { MANAGING K-12 EDUCATION }
Better than Bake Sale Funding for Capital Projects
It doesn’t matter how good your facilities plan is... if you can’t fund it, you can’t build it.
YOU’VE JUST FINISHED calculations and priorities for your school district’s desperately needed projects. You have estimated the total project costs, and adjusted for the timeframe and inflation. You have even added a contingen- cy percentage for unanticipated costs. But now is the really hard part — time to find the funding for the project.
By Mike Raible and Andrew LaRowe
Traditional Methods of Funding
If your approach to funding is tradition- al, you know there are the usual suspects, the three methods for funding capital proj- ects: general obligation bonds, certificates of participation and pay-as-you-go.
General Obligation Bonds require a positive vote on a referendum, a sale of the
Capital funding sources that are formula-based are promising because they seem to be more or less stable and reliable.
30 SCHOOL PLANNING & MANAGEMENT / OCTOBER 2017
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PHOTOS COURTESY OF SFL+A