Omar Garcia and the School Finance “Template”
Friday, February 26th, 2010Equity Center Radio | February 26, 2010 | A Discussion About the School Finance Template with its Originator, Omar Garcia
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Today, our host, the Equity Center’s Director, Wayne Pierce, interviews Omar Garcia, the Director of Statewide School Finance for the Education Service Center, Region XIII
Omar Garcia is an icon in Texas public school finance, having spent much of his adult life working in the school finance division at the Texas Education Agency, and later in the statewide school finance arena at Education Service Center, Region XIII. He graduated from Texas A&I University (now Texas A&M Kingsville) and then went on to earn his MBA from that school.
While employed at the Texas Education Agency (where he worked for over 28 years) in the Division of State Funding he became an expert on the use of technology to audit and estimate state aide and school district’s anticipated overall revenues, a necessary component to producing schools’ annual budgets. This expertise lead Omar, about 20 years ago, to develop one of the first widely used electronic templates to help public school personnel estimate state aid for use in school budgets. These early, simple templates were developed using an early version of Lotus 1─2─3 software. Over the years, as public school funding became increasingly complex, “Omar’s Template” increased in sophistication to meet the challenge.
Today, this trusted tool is used by every Texas district regardless of wealth or size. Currently, it is designed to produce a ballpark estimate of a district’s total revenue (excluding facilities) for school years 2008-09 through 2012-13. Once the data are loaded, the user can make any necessary changes to the data for any year and produce reliable, updated forecast for school district funding purposes.
In January 2002 Omar retired as the Senior Director of the Division of State Funding for TEA and became employed at Region XIII Education Service Center. He started with Region XIII in February 2002, as the Director of Statewide School Finance–where he continues to update and improve his template, and now develops numerous others too.
Today’s interview focuses on how he came to develop the template and how it is used by school districts throughout the State of Texas.
You can learn more about Region XIII and the numerous finance templates it provides for school districts by logging into their web pages at Region XIII | Introduction to Statewide School Finance The Service Center (and Omar) may be reached at Education Service Center Region XIII, 5701 Springdale Road Austin, TX 78723, 512.919.5313. Omar’s direct phone number is 512.919.5349 and his email address is Omar Garcia at ESC13 .
Omar Garcia
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Tags: Equity Center, finance, Opinion, Podcast, public schools, school district budget, school districts, school finance template, Texas Education Agency
