Access to data drives policy changes and $1 million increase in facility revenues
Like many districts across the country, East Side Union High School District and its CBO Marcus Battle were facing challenging budget cuts and were looking to the facility use program for possible additional funds. In the first year alone, revenue from community use of district facilities jumped from $450,000 to over $2 million as a result of a new focus on the program and efficiencies created by the Facilitron partnership.
“I needed to increase revenue, so I came in and basically asked Facilitron, how can we maximize and get this number from $2 to $3 million?” said Battle.
Data gathered by Facilitron had already allowed the district to establish relative benchmarks for overall approval rates, and further analysis by Facilitron helped identify district schools whose rates were out of line with others in the district. The analysis also revealed another area of leakage – fee adjustments on rentals discounted from school board mandated rates. Current district policy allowed individual admins at each school to manage and approve external rental requests leading to inconsistency.
“Access to the data allowed us to change our policies for administering community rental requests occurring after school hours and bring the responsibility for those requests back to the district so we could drive more revenue.”
In just a few months, this data-driven policy adjustment has resulted in reduced fee discounting, higher approval rates, and a reduction in approval inconsistencies across schools.