Interview with Thomas White of the Michigan School Business Officials
Announcer: Welcome to Inside Michigan Education. A weekly show featuring interviews with community leaders, school administrators, school business officials and individuals who are passionate about the future of Michigan Education. And now, here is your host for Inside Michigan Education, Rob Huisingh.
Rob Huisingh: Welcome to Inside Michigan Education, this week we are joined by Mr. Thomas White. Tom is the Executive Director of the Michigan School Business Officials, also known as the MSBO. Welcome Tom, it's a pleasure to have you on our show.
Thomas White: Thank you.
Rob Huisingh: Tom, I would like you to take just a few minutes to tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, and how you came to head up the MSBO?
Thomas White: Well, it's actually kind of a logical extension of the jobs that I've held before. I started out of college as a Labor Negotiator, straight out of college. I was representing school management negotiations, and I did that for 10 years, and typically 10-15 contracts a year. So, I cut my teeth in Labor Relations. I moved from that into being a lobbyist for the Michigan Association of School Boards, and I likewise did that for about ten years. I was the lobbyist when Proposal A was passed, and when they redid the school code, and when a lot of other kind of interesting things went on in the legislature before term limits. I was lucky enough to get out of lobbying right about the time that term limits came into effect, and I've been with the Michigan School Business Officials ever since then, and that's just over ten years now.
Rob Huisingh: I suspect that some of our listeners might be surprised to hear that there is a large organization in Michigan that has the words Michigan School and business all in that close of a proximity, but even in a relatively small school, it's a pretty good sized business, isn't it?
Thomas White: Absolutely, when you look at a small town, often the school is the largest business in that town. You could have a school district with a thousand students, that would be a pretty small school district. They might have a budget in the range of $10 million. So, schools are often the largest business in the community, and you get into a large school, and you get into a Detroit, and you're talking about a billion dollar budget.
So, you're dealing with budgets that are millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, and have all the same kinds of issues that a business has. Most people understand the curricular side of education, but there is a business behind that curricular side; whether it's transportation, food services, managing facilities, which are multimillion, hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of their value, and that's what our members do. They do all those things. They do the auditing, accounting, and payroll, and purchasing, and all the things that keep a school going.
Rob Huisingh: For those of our listeners that are unfamiliar with the MSBO, how is it that you go about improving the school management and operational services, and maybe could you speak just a little bit to the overall mission of the organization?
Thomas White: Sure. Well, you've pretty much stated our mission. Our mission is to assist in improving the overall management and efficiency of schools. We have a special focus in our charter on, interview conservation is an example. We go about it in a wide variety of ways. We're a very diverse organization. We're not big in the context of most associations. We have a staff of 11 people, but we do a lot of things, and a lot of different things.
One of our main functions is professional development. We put on probably 100-150 programs a year between MSBO, and a company called the Michigan Institute for Educational Management that we own in conjunction with MASA, the Superintendent's group. So, professional development, training people for these jobs is a very, very important facet of what we do, probably the number one most important thing we do, because somebody might know how to be an accountant or they might have a background in accounting, but they don't know what it means to be an accountant in a school district in Michigan, and that's what we teach them. Likewise with facilities, food services, and so on, we really focus on training people to perform their function in a school district in Michigan.
Outside of that, we have a wide variety of products and services that we offer to our schools. As an example of something where we're trying to improve efficiency for schools. We do a statewide bid for school buses. We sell maybe a third of the school buses sold in the state during the course of year, go through the MSBO. We bid them out, do all the legal work, do the bidding, and then put them up on our website. We've paid to have a programmer developer web based kind of a marketplace for school buses, a school district can go in and they can build their bus online, and then they can get the pricing immediately from at least three different companies. So, it really takes a lot away from them having to do. So, we do things like that.
We have a school business manual that we prepare for both new and veteran school business officials, so you've got an easy resource.
We have a thing called a purchase card that we do in conjunction with a couple of other originations, that we bid out to various banks and say okay, we want to provide this particular product for schools, a purchase card, which will allow schools to better manager their resources, and better control their spending by using not a credit card, but a purchase card, that we have a great deal and managery[sic] control on.
We have a thing called pay schools, where we set it up with schools so parents can pay online. Instead of pinning the dollar bill to your kid, or sending a check with your kid, you can go online and pay for lunch, pay for books, pay for programs, and so on.
Really, the list is quite long, so I will stop with that one, we have quite a few more things we do.
The other major thing that we do that's very important to our members is representation. Probably in many of their minds that's the most important thing we do. We represent them in the capital; we represent them with the regulators who they work with on a regular basis. We either interface on their behalf, help them solve problems, or we provide information to them about what's going on, what's going on in the current situation in the capital, to the best that we can do.
Rob Huisingh: Tom, what are some of the leading issues that are facing school business officials today?
Thomas White: Well, without jumping to the obvious one first, the leading issue probably for the last few years has been efficiency, and creating new efficiencies, because we've been really five years, six years now in a situation where we're either getting the same or fewer dollars from the state year and year out. So, no matter how we cut it, what we have to do is figure out how to provide the services to kids at lower cost to the district. So, that's probably the main agenda item.
That being said, you put it all in the context of what's going on in Lansing right now, that's what's on everybody's mind. School districts by law have to have their budget done by the June 30th of each year. So, our districts all had to turn their budgets in by June 30 of 2007, or else, no state aid, no this, no that, you're embarrassed and so on. So, you have to do your budget before you even know what state aid you're going to be receiving. In the case that we are in right now, I mean the rumors are, well, you get $100 per pupil, you get $150 per pupil, oh, by the way, you're going to get nothing per pupil. Oh, you could take a cut per pupil.
So, it's just the most frustrating time for our members I think in my experience, because we're asked to run schools and to run programs, and yet we have -- I won't say no idea, but that it's probably pretty close to that in this environment, we have very little of an idea of what our revenues are going to be. We're already a month into the school year, looking at two months into the school year without knowing what our revenues are going to be. It's crazy, and from my perspective, we can do better, we've always done better in the past, and Michigan deserves better, our kids deserve better.
Rob Huisingh: I can imagine it's a bit like trying to run a company and not having any financial view on what your sales are on a given month, and bridging that out over two months, three months?
Thomas White: That's right, only in this case it's a little harder in the sense that we got -- if you've got a thousand kids sitting in classrooms, then you can't just kind of reduce your operation, you can't say well, we don't know what sales are so we're going to -- in that case you just say, well, we won't build as many widgets. In this case, those widgets are sitting in the classroom, we have to provide education. So, in a sense it's even a little bit more difficult for us.
Rob Huisingh: Tom, you run an awful lot of events through the MSBO, what are some of the conferences and expos that you have coming up that you would like to call to our listener's attention?
Thomas White: Well, probably the most important one is the nearest one, and it should be really interesting for our members. We do an annual conference in conjunction with the Michigan Department of Education, and it's going to be on October 23rd in East Lansing. It's going to be particularly interesting this year, because hopefully we will have the state financial situation set by then. It will be the first chance for us to tell our members face-to-face and to have people from the state talking to our members and telling them here's what the deal is, here's how much you're going to get, here are the new rules for different categorical programs and so on. So, it's a place where they will be able to get the latest, greatest information about what hopefully has happened by then. Otherwise, I guess we will have a group therapy session, if we don't have this stuff.
Beyond that, in January we have a Financial Strategies Conference, which is where we try to help our members prepare for the coming year, doing forecast, economic forecast, and forecasting what state aid is going to be. Again, we focus there on things like, how do you control your healthcare cost, or how do you manage -- not many people know 403(b)s and what 403(b)s are, but a whole bunch of new rules and regulations just came down from the Federal Government, and how we manage these retirement, voluntary retirement vehicles in schools. It just means one more thing that school business managers have to do that's really not on point of increasing efficiency or helping kids, we just have to do it because the Federal Government says we have to do it. If you make a mistake, the stakes are very high. So, we will be focusing on some things like efficiencies in the area of healthcare, what the new regulations are from the State and Federal Government, and what's coming up down the road, so that school districts can do their planning.
Rob Huisingh: Well, Tom, I want to thank you for taking the time to be with us today and for sharing information about the Michigan School Business Officials. I know there are many more specific issues that you could share information with us, and I hope you will be on the show again sometime.
Thomas White: Sure, be happy to do so, thank you.
Rob Huisingh: If you would like to contact Tom White, he can be reached by telephone at (517) 327-2580, again, that's (517) 327-2580, To read more about the Michigan School Business Officials online, or to subscribe to Tom's email newsletter, please visit www.msbo.org, again, that URL is www.msbo.org. Until next week, this is Rob Huisingh with Inside Michigan Education.
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