Budgeting for your Preschool or Early Childhood Center

Your students may be happy, your parents may be thrilled and your staff may be ecstatic. Nevertheless, a preschool or early childhood center, including non-profits, is a business and must be run as such. Your budget is probably your most important concern, although a program focus may seem much more attractive! Creating an appropriate budget, following and monitoring it will do much to keep you out of financial trouble.  

Fundraising ideas

Income from the state (public schools) or tuition and other fees (non-public schools) can, and usually does, fall short of what your school needs or wants. So to make up or to augment that income, you will need to fundraise and believe me, everyone is sick of bake sales / cookie dough sales / spellathons which typically do not bring in sufficient to justify the effort anyway. I am not saying that bake sales / cookie dough sales / spellathons are not a good thing for an elementary class project in that they teach planning, organizing, the value of time and money and so on, but for the real cash you need, they just do not do.

Funding your school

Despite what happens in the classroom, what happens behind the scenes show clearly that a school is a business and must be run as such. This includes non-profits! Fewer things cause more problems for an administrator than funding, and funding issues are almost certainly the number one cause of school failures.