Position Overview
The Office of Fiscal Strategy (OFS) is a catalyst for ensuring excellence, equity, and efficiency to ensure DCPS achieves our goals for our students. We want employees who recognize and embrace the importance of a strong partnership between schools and Central Services. When Central Services runs efficiently, and provides high-quality customer service, our school-based employees can concentrate on educating our children and leading our schools. By combining financial planning with strategic planning, this office supports DCPS with actively identifying resources, costs and budget and aligning them with our mission and goals.
Divisions/Teams: The Office of Fiscal Strategy is organized into four divisions
Finance: Ensures school and central services finances are allocated and expended in alignment with the agency’s strategic plan, in a manner that fosters transparency, maximizes funds, promotes equity, and ensures compliance with requirements.
Contracts and Acquisitions: Provides procurement services to schools and Central Services programs through contract and purchase order processes in alignment with District and Federal procurement laws and regulations. Manages and facilitates the procurement of goods and services for all DCPS schools and central services, that fosters transparency, maximizes buying power, promotes equity of spending with local vendors, and ensures compliance with contractual requirements.
Operational Finance (Core): Works to improve organizational effectiveness and to ensure daily fiscal operations are managed efficiently across DCPS. The Operational Finance Team advocates for DCPS programs and schools by shepherding collaboration with procurement, budget, and HR teams. Operational Finance provides oversight to ensure equitable, transparent, and compliant personnel and non-personnel spending through quality customer service.
The Finance Division within the Office of Fiscal Strategy includes four teams:
School Finance: Oversees the annual budget formulation process for DCPS schools, including the allocation of resources, engaging and collaborating with internal and external budget stakeholders, and publishing school budget reports and information. The team ensures that the allocation of resources is aligned to the agency's vision and strategic priorities.
Budget Strategy: Oversees annual development and implementation of agency budget, including coordination of new policies and programs as directed by DCPS leadership. Budget Strategy works to solve long-term budget challenges, improve budget processes across the agency, and serves as key relationship holder with OCFO.
Grant Administration: Oversees and manages all direct federal, intradistrict, and private grants. The team ensures that DCPS is following all relevant federal grant regulations, and that all grants are expended in accordance with the approved grant application.
Monitoring and Program Support: Exists to ensure implementation, guidance, and compliance of federal government mandates that Local Education Agencies (LEAs) must provide to schools. The team works with school leaders and service providers to understand best practices for operating a successful federal program in public and private schools, and oversees fiduciary responsibilities as outlined in ESSA, Titles I-IV.
The Specialist, School Finance will play a key role in school budget development by conducting program specific budget modeling and analysis. As part of a team, the specialists will lead the School Finance team's data management, reporting, and analysis. Specialists will also be responsible for leading the internal and external budget engagement work as well as communication with various stakeholders. With support from the School Finance leadership, specialists will manage projects critical to school budget development and are content level experts.
This position has been designated as Security Sensitive. Pursuant to section 410 of Chapter 4 of the D.C. Personnel Regulations; in addition to the general suitability screening, individuals applying for or occupying security sensitive positions are subject to the following checks and tests: Criminal background check; Sex Offender Registry check; Traffic record check (as applicable); Consumer credit check (as applicable); Reasonable suspicion drug and alcohol test; and Post-accident or incident drug and alcohol test.
The Specialist, School Finance will report to the Director, School Finance.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities
The below statements are intended to describe the general nature and scope of work being performed by this position. This is not a complete listing of all responsibilities, duties, and/or skills required. Other duties may be assigned.
- Leads the development and production of school budget guidance and public documents.
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Plays a key role in engaging and collaborating with program office teams.
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Supports program office teams in creating and updating models for funding school programming.
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Supports the Director and Chief Business Officer in communicating key information to Senior Leadership to ensure successful school budgeting year-round.
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Builds relationships and supports principals during budget development and throughout the year to spend their funds as efficiently as possible.
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Oversees development and use of the School Budget QuickBase Application.
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Plays a key role in development of a new student-based budgeting model.
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Supports community engagement as it relates to school budgets and the potential rollout of a new budgeting model.
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Facilitates fast and efficient decision making required for progress on the work.
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Develops and cultivates relationships important to the success of the organization.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree and three to five years of related work experience.
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Master's degree preferred.
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Previous exposure to or experience in the education sector a plus.
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Advanced excel skills.
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Strong communication skills including written and verbal.
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Highly organized and detailed oriented.
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Ability to build and foster relationships across individuals and teams.
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Can work well under tight deadlines and execute at high levels.
- STUDENTS FIRST: We recognize students as whole children and put their needs first in everything we do.
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COURAGE: We have the audacity to learn from our successes and failures, to try new things, and to lead the nation as a proof point of PK-12 success.
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EQUITY: We work proactively to eliminate opportunity gaps by interrupting institutional bias and investing in effective strategies to ensure every student succeeds.
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EXCELLENCE: We work with integrity and hold ourselves accountable for exemplary outcomes, service, and interactions.
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TEAMWORK: We recognize that our greatest asset is our collective vision and ability to work collaboratively and authentically.
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JOY: We enjoy our collective work and will enthusiastically celebrate our success and each other.
We are an equal opportunity employer and are committed to creating an inclusive, accessible workplace. We welcome and encourage applications from individuals with disabilities. Accommodation and/or application assistance is available upon request at all stages of the application and employment process. To request accommodation, please contact [email protected].
