Good morning everyone,

The school year is officially back in session, and we’re committed to keeping these broadcasts landing every Saturday at 8:00 a.m. your time. Thanks for reading.

Let's get straight into the content for this weekend:

• Leveraging the master schedule
• A case study in targeted behavior intervention work
• Research turned into practice you can use tomorrow
• The podcast!

Don’t forget to follow, subscribe, and engage with me on social media. So many of you are regular readers, and that’s the foundation of this work. Your engagement is what keeps me writing.

Leveraging the master schedule:

Each of these tiles you see represents about $20,000. Too many school leaders don't have the skills to effectively leverage the master schedule.

Ask a lot of school leaders how they manage budgets, and they’ll tell you about their finance system and school-level accounts — the general administrative account, discretionary funds, instructional supplies, maybe a graduation account, or a state or federal grant for specific training. Very few will tell you, without hesitation, that their master schedule is their biggest budget. It is.

Here are my tips for leveraging the master schedule effectively:

• Make it visible and use it as a leadership tool
• Build in leadership roles (the gray tiles above in this image are instructional coach sections)
• Don't be afraid to strategically lower class size where strong classroom instruction exists, particularly around formative assessment

A case study in targeted behavior intervention work:

Tier II behavior intervention programs take extraordinary resources to get right. These are salaries for a public high school's tier two behavior intervention team. Tier II Tiered Fidelity Inventory (TFI) 3.0

I have a buddy who did something extraordinary. He earned his principalship and inherited zero staffing for his Tier II student population. After two years, he had five employees (salaries above) and a Tier II fidelity score of 80% on the 3.0 TFI (linked above). It’s worth noting this was an impacted school, but not heavily impacted — 35% low SES, 15% SWD, and 5% EL. He got there by reallocating almost an entire state-driven resource allocation plan toward these five employees. I’ll keep this section short and end with a simple, but hopefully powerful, explanation of just how resource-intensive it is to earn a legitimate 80% fidelity score on the 3.0 version of the PBIS Tier II TFI.

His school spent around $13,000 per student. His Tier II population — known precisely because he implemented the TFI at a high level — was 62 students. Add up all five salaries and you get $220,019.03. Divide that by 62, and you get an added investment of about $3,548 per student — a 27% increase over baseline. Some adequacy models weight these students even higher. And keep in mind, many states already spend more than that $13,000 baseline for every single public education student they serve. I hope that explanation lands — reach out if you want to dig into this further. I love this topic.

Here are my tips for building a truly effective tier two behavior intervention program:

• It might sound harsh, but first find out if you can even really afford it
• If you can’t afford it, adjust what fidelity actually looks like; a lack of resources isn’t an excuse for skipping great work for your students and teachers
• Obsess over the TFI (linked here for you); just look at it, and bring those conditions into reality

Research turned into practice:

Understanding why revenue streams matter This image and article do a great job explaining the basics of education finance revenue. I’m including it here because it’s genuinely a research topic for a lot of you — some of you already have command of this information, but for many school leaders and instructional coaches who don’t work with financial resources directly, this is brand-new territory. The key concept: local revenue is generally the least restrictive, while federal revenue is the most restrictive — though it serves an important purpose. That matters because research is starting to show that states moving away from restrictive formulas toward progressively weighted funding (sending more resources to higher-need students) with local control see the greatest efficacy. Article from where I took this image

Here’s my advice for turning this knowledge and research into practice tomorrow:

• Ask your district or business office for a breakdown of your funding by source — local, state, and federal — so you know exactly how restrictive each dollar really is
• Spend flexible local dollars first on building-level priorities, and reserve restricted federal dollars strictly for their intended, compliant use
• Check whether your highest-need students are actually receiving proportionally more resources, not just more attention, and adjust if the numbers don’t match the need

The podcast is here!

We’re in the middle of shooting a 15-episode podcast — each one just 15 minutes, designed for school leaders, aspiring leaders, and higher-ed K-12 folks to listen to on their way to work. Five episodes are finished so far.

Check them out and give me some feedback.

In full disclosure, this whole content-creation and online-presence thing can be insanely defeating. I’m genuinely passionate about this work, but some days are still a bear. I want to close, once again, by thanking everyone who’s been here since July 10, 2025, when I published my very first LinkedIn post, and everyone who jumped right back in after I took a long break from about January through May. If you’re someone who reads but stops just short of engaging, take the leap the next time you have a question or want to learn more. I don’t know everything — one of my goals here is for us to learn and make new meaning together, for the sake of public education and high-performing leadership.

Thanks,

Ryan