THE Journal, a leading resource for administrative, technical, and academic technology leaders in K-12 education, reported that spending for education technology was up in the 2016 school year, continuing to increase on trend, following three years of recession thrift. Furthermore, a report by IDC Government Insights noted that IT spending in K-12 schools hit 4.7 billion in the U.S. by the end of 2015.
Details in THE Journal were obtained from the findings of a lengthy report titled, “State of the K-12 Market 2015,” published by EdNET Insight. According to the report, about half of the districts were “holding fast” to 2015’s technology budget increases with no changes expected, and between 27 and 46 percent hoped to up their spending in 2016. Only 8-12 percent were working with decreased budgets.
The biggest areas of expansion were hardware (46 percent of districts expected to see more in this category) and teacher training (38 percent). At the same time, 28 percent of districts were boosting software budgets and 27 percent were increasing tech support over the previous year. This level of IT spending in education is not expected to decrease any time soon. In fact, it is expected to stay constant and even grow, as technology becomes more important in the modern classroom.
As K-12 education undergoes a digital transformation, it becomes apparent that conventional budgeting and financial management systems are no longer sufficient to deliver the budgetary framework and accounting capabilities needed by K-12 districts to stay on top of their financial health. They require a fully-integrated solution that links strategic planning, budgeting, and performance reporting to a system that has been designed specifically to meet the unique needs of the K-12 sector.
If you are looking for a robust budgeting and financial management tool, then look no further. Questica’s multi-user school budgeting software simplifies the assembly, tracking, analyzing and reporting of Operating, Salary & Capital budgets. It uses real-time data and efficient workflow to improve accuracy and collaboration. It also offers one point of data entry and seamless integration with a school’s financial system.
Questica delivers a comprehensive suite of financial management tools for K-12 districts, while also offering a high level of configurability and integration to a wide variety of ERP systems such as Oracle, SAP, Tyler Munis, Microsoft Dynamics GP, etc.
If you would like to leverage the best practices contained in proven COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) software solution for your school district, request a demo of Questica’s Solutions for K-12 today.
