Extra Fiscal and Time Resources for School, Provided by Classroom Teachers

Recent reform efforts in school restructuring have created school governance structures at local school sites to allow more inputs from classroom teachers under the shared-decision-making models. While decisions in the areas of curriculum, school safety, student discipline, and parent involvement have been widely decentralized, fiscal decisions are still reserved to the administration, usually the principal, in many schools. Allowing teachers and parents decision-making power in the budget issue has been strongly recommended as a key element for successful site-based management (Oswald, 1995; Rideout, 1995; Shortt, 1994). Wagoner (1995) contends that control of the budget function is at the heart of school-based management and decision-making power over the budgeting process should be given to the school staff. Currently, no research findings are available on how teachers would behave when they get to participate in the budget decision-making process. Theories on how people, as a group, make public choices on public-goods expenditures (Stiglitz, 1988) suggest that teachers at school sites will more likely make decisions that will benefit themselves. When faced with the fiscal difficulty, administrative decisions, such as employee-lay-off, salary reduction, class size increase, freeze on purchase of new supplies, or reduction in teacher aides, were made to reduce expenses (Butterfield & Wolfe, 1994; Hartzog, 1993; Shaw, 1994; Trotter, 1992). Some schools were able to cut expenses by asking teachers or parents to volunteer to offer special programs (Little & Little, 1994; Rathgeb, 1994; Trotter, 1992). When the administration makes decisions to reduce the budget for instructional materials or teaching aides, teachers end up spending their own money to purchase necessary materials and spend their free time to attend to the school matters. This study, therefore, proposed to explore the magnitude and the nature of the fiscal and time expenses provided by classroom teachers with a goal of providing a starting point for future research on school improvement through shared budget decision makings. Two research questions were formulated as guidelines for the investigation of educational resources provided by teachers: 1 How much and for what do teachers spend their personal funds for education? 2 How much and for what do teachers spend their personal time for education? Methods One hundred and ten public classroom teachers from 27 school districts in southern California have completed surveys on fiscal and time expenses not reimbursed or compensated by the school. Frequencies and means for the variables were computed for the entire sample first, then adjusted to calculate the actual amounts of money and time spent by teachers who were involved in the expense of the specific items. The variables were then grouped according to the average amount of personal expenses or time and to the level of teachers involved in spending personal money or time. Results Expense The survey results indicated that about 90% of the teachers actually spent their personal money for education, each spending about $1,466.79 per year on average. Table 1 depicts the levels and degrees of teacher involvement in various expense items. Table 1 Itemized Teachers' Personal Educational Expense, by Involvement and Amount Category %(*) Amount($)(*) 1. computer equipment/supplies 36 433.71 2. expendable instructional materials 61 310.14 3. conference fees 49 270.40 4. professional association membership fees 73 251.76 5. reference instructional materials 72 219.67 6. software for teaching-related purposes 37 208. …