Education leaders have long recognized that schools have unlimited needs and limited resources. As such, leaders must make difficult sacrifices.
Lack of school funding, has led many education leaders to refocus their attention on their mission statement to guide them in making those difficult decisions. Schools that participate in the Middle States accreditation process know how important the mission statement is to the development of meaningful short-term and long-term goals and the budget needed to help achieve those goals.
The relationship between the accreditation process and determining where a school will spend their scarce resources, is found in the definition of economics, the study of how best to allocate scarce resources among competing uses.
In practice, the accreditation process is grounded in the fundamental premise of economics. As such, the mission of a school should drive those hard decisions to fund only expenses that contribute to the ongoing mission of the school. Accredited schools know, understand and practice the theories of economics routinely. As a result, students, families, communities and the economy benefit.
