Don't let CTE become an episode of Flip or Flop! Here are 4 musts for success

Switching school districts and Career and Technical Education programs can be a challenging task for a CTE director. It’s even more difficult if your goal is to revitalize a program. It can even resemble an episode of everyone’s favorite HGTV show, “Flip or Flop”.

Where do you begin? Do you change the cabinets (courses offered)? Is that a good color of paint (curriculum)?

For a CTE director walking into a new program, there are four things to request (pull and print) and review to have a successful “flip”. Each one serves its own purpose:

School District Summary of Finance Report
PEIMS October Snapshot Data & the TSDS PEIMS Payroll Information By Program Intent Codes 21 thru 25
Course Selection Guides (some districts’ call Educational Planning Guide)
Master Schedules, Teachers Certifications, and your state Teacher Certification Chart.

1. First, pull and print your school district’s Summary of Finance Report. The things that you want to review within this document are:

CTE State Allotment – displays the amount of money that the CTE program brings in for your school district. From this number, you can calculate the 58 percent that should be coming back to the CTE program.
- Many districts pay CTE administrators/teachers’ salaries out of this 58 percent, but once you subtract this amount out of the 58 percent, the remaining money should be coming back to the program for supplies, equipment and etc.
  - This is where the TSDS PEIMS Payroll Information By Program Intent Codes 21 thru 25, comes in handy (see down below).
- In addition, you cannot pay for middle school/intermediate teachers’ salaries and supplies out of the 58 percent, unless the class that the teacher teaches receives weighted funding, such as Career and Technical Education classes for Students with Disabilities (CTED).
- Your district should not be charging you for electricity, water etc. out of these allotment; if they are, then make sure that the district is charging ALL special programs electricity, water and etc. It is against the law for a district to only charge one special program for these types of operational costs.
CTE Transportation Allotment–make sure that your district is requesting monies if they use school district vehicles to transport CTE students to practicum sites or transport students between campuses.