Throughout each fiscal year and school year, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) provides support to local education agencies (LEAs) to help their staff complete an array of requirements such as statewide assessments and attendance reporting. These requirements are often legally mandated, some locally and some federally, and present unique opportunities for internal collaboration across OSSE divisions and external collaboration across agencies—such as the Common Financial Reporting Standards (CFRS). In this post, we’ll share what the CFRS are and what you can learn from the data they provide.

CFRS Overview

CFRS was introduced following a requirement of the School Financial Transparency Amendment Act of 2020 (Subtitle (IV)(F) of the Fiscal Year 2021 Budget Support Act of 2020), for the Deputy Mayor for Education (DME) to establish common financial reporting standards for DC public and public charter schools’ budgeted and actual expenditures across a number of categories by May 31, 2021.

In addition to being a local requirement, participation in CFRS helps OSSE meet the federal requirement of Section 1111(h)(1)(C)(x) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as amended by ESSA, for the District of Columbia and all states to report “the per-pupil expenditures of Federal, State, and local funds, including actual personnel expenditures and actual non-personnel expenditures of Federal, State, and local funds, disaggregated by source of funds, for each local educational agency and each school in the State for the preceding fiscal year.”

After establishing the value proposition and guiding principles for the development of CFRS along with OSSE, DME conducted a working group with membership spanning 20 LEAs (including DCPS) as well as the DC Public Charter School Board (PCSB). Throughout these convenings, stakeholders discussed potential approaches to reporting and potential challenges for translating the policy to practice. Some key notes for reporting are:

• All expenditures are to be reported at the school level,
• Expenditures associated with Uniform Per-Pupil Student Funding Formula (UPSFF) At-Risk Funding must be provided per the law, and
• All expenditures will be submitted on an absolute dollar basis and will subsequently be reported on a per-pupil basis.

Expenditure Categories

CFRS expenditures are to be reported by the following categories:

• Instructional Staff
• School Support Staff
• School Administrators
• Instructional Supports
• Educational Materials
• Non-educational Administrative Supports, Buildings
• Operations
• Food Services

Reporting Types

Financial data collected by OSSE are also used to calculate Per-Pupil Expenditures (PPX) and to ensure that charter LEAs are meeting Maintenance of Effort (MOE) requirements.

PPX

LEAs report their total school-level and school share of centralized expenditures (for multi-site LEAs). OSSE then calculates the PPX amount by adding school-level expenditures to the school’s share of centralized expenditures and dividing by the school’s audited enrollment count for that school year. This calculation is automated in the Quickbase tool after LEAs enter their data for both federal expenditures and state/local expenditures. PPX data is not used by OSSE in its statewide accountability calculations.

MOE

A subgrantee may receive federal funds for a covered program for a fiscal year only if OSSE finds that whichever of the following methods are more favorable to the subgrantee (ESEA Sec. 8521):

• Aggregate state/local education expenditures, or
• Per-pupil state/local education expenditures from the previous fiscal year are at least 90 percent as high as the second previous fiscal year.

If the subgrantee fails to meet MOE and also failed to meet MOE once before within the five immediately preceding fiscal years, OSSE must reduce the federal funding allocation in the exact proportion by which they failed to maintain effort. (See ESEA Section 8521(b)(1).) A five year grace period is new flexibility under ESSA and applies to all subgrantees nationwide. If an LEA fails to meet MOE, such lesser amount shall not be used to reset the LEA’s level by which expenditure efforts must be maintained. (See ESEA 8521(b)(2).) Covered programs include the following federal ESEA funds DC receives (ESEA Sec. 8101):

• Title I-A (Education for the Disadvantaged)
• Title I-D (Neglected and Delinquent)
• Title II-A (Teachers and Leaders)
• Title III-A (English Language Acquisition)
• Title IV-A (Student Support and Academic Enrichment)
• Title IV-B (21st Century Community Learning Centers)

CFRS Data Collection Timeline

While OSSE’s Budget and Finance team drives the project timeline and leads LEA communication, the execution of the CFRS timeline is also a collaborative effort between OSSE’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and the Division of Data, Assessment, and Research (DAR). This collaboration begins annually as early as October as team members discuss and implement potential modifications to the Quickbase LEA Financial Reporting Tool.

Once the tool is updated, OSSE releases it to LEAs in January, and the Budget and Finance team provides resources to assist with LEA data submission until its March due date including virtual office hours, a step-by-step instructional document, and an informational video.

After LEAs submit their data, team members from the various aforementioned OSSE divisions verify the data through May which includes supporting LEAs in making corrections, performing comparative analyses to previous years, and ultimately ensuring the raw data LEAs submitted reflects an accurate and digestible narrative of the LEA’s financial data on the DC School Report Card.

Once this quality assurance process is completed, OSSE uploads the CFRS data to the DC School Report Card in Finance section. While all other DC School Report Card data is published annually in the December following the conclusion of its corresponding school year, CFRS data is published annually in the May following the conclusion of the corresponding school year due to the requirement for reporting to include audited financial data.

Annual CFRS Timeline

October– December	OSSE divisions of OPS, CIO and DAR collaborate to discuss updates and developments to the Quickbase LEA Financial Reporting Tool.
January	Quickbase LEA Financial Reporting Tool opens.
March	Quickbase LEA Financial Reporting Tool closes.
April-May	OSSE verifies and calculates data through a multi-step quality assurance process.
May	Final financial data published on report card.

OSSE publishes the CFRS data on the DC School Report Card annually with goals to:

• Allow schools and stakeholders to readily access and understand resource allocation
• Empower LEAs and communities to assess and improve equity
• Lead LEAs and communities toward a better understanding of the relationship between student outcomes and financial resource allocation decisions
• Enable LEAs, schools, and the District (DME/OSSE) to identify evidence-based best practices and opportunities and foster innovation for peer-to-peer learning.

Learn More

We encourage you to check out these data on the DC School Report Card! Here is a link to the DC Overall data, but you can also look at data at the LEA and school levels by using the search bar and clicking on the “Finance” icon.