The Grant-Funded Program That Cannot Pay for Itself
Your small heritage site runs a school program that served 1,400 students last year. A one-year grant of $18,000 covered a part-time coordinator at $14,000, materials at $2,000, and bus subsidies at $2,000. The grant ends in three months and is not renewable. The coordinator delivers most of the programs and also handles booking. Schools pay nothing and have come to expect a free program; 80 percent of bookings come from schools in lower-income areas that rely on the bus subsidy. Your site's operating budget has a $9,000 contingency line. Staff estimate that a fee of $4 per student would raise about $5,600 but would likely cut bookings by 20 percent, and dropping the bus subsidy would cut bookings by a further 30 percent among the schools that most need the program.
1. Lay out the financial problem and the options, with the arithmetic, before recommending a course.
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The program costs about $18,000 a year to run as currently staffed and is about to have no dedicated funding. Option A, close the program, saves $18,000 but loses 1,400 student visits and the site's main education audience. Option B, absorb it entirely into the $9,000 contingency, is not possible: the gap is $9,000 short of the full cost, and spending the whole contingency on one program leaves no reserve. Option C, charge $4 per student: at 1,400 students that is $5,600, but a 20 percent booking drop leaves about 1,120 students and about $4,480 in fees, and the program still costs roughly $18,000, so the gap remains large. Option D, charge the fee and keep the bus subsidy: fees of about $4,480 against costs of about $18,000 still leaves a gap of about $13,500. Option E, a blended model: reduce coordinator hours, charge a modest fee, seek a new grant or sponsor for the bus subsidy specifically, and use part of the contingency as bridge funding. The arithmetic shows no single lever closes an $18,000 gap, so the recommendation must combine levers and must protect the access mission, since the bus subsidy is what keeps the neediest schools coming.
2. Recommend a course of action that balances solvency with the site's access mission, and justify the trade-offs.
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Recommend Option E. First, restructure staffing: shift booking to existing front-desk staff and reduce the coordinator to a seasonal or shared role, targeting a saving of roughly $5,000 to $6,000. Second, introduce a modest fee of $3 to $4 per student but waive it for Title I or equivalent schools, so the fee raises revenue from those able to pay without excluding those who cannot. Third, ring-fence the bus subsidy and fund it separately through a local business sponsor or transport grant, since it is the single lever most tied to the access mission and the most damaging to cut. Fourth, use $4,000 to $5,000 of the contingency as a one-year bridge, not as a permanent subsidy, with a written sunset. The trade-offs are explicit: a fee will cost some bookings, and reduced coordinator hours will slow booking response; both are preferable to closing the program or to spending the entire reserve. The plan buys a year to find recurring funding while keeping most of the 1,400 visits and protecting the schools that depend on the subsidy.
3. What would you measure over the next year to know whether the plan is working, and what triggers a rethink?
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Measure four things monthly: bookings by school and by income category, to see whether the fee waiver is protecting access; revenue from fees against the $4,480 to $5,600 estimate; coordinator hours and booking turnaround time, to catch service collapse from the staffing cut; and the bus subsidy balance against sponsor commitments. Set explicit triggers for a rethink: if bookings fall more than 20 percent overall, or more than 10 percent among waiver schools, the fee structure is harming the mission and should be adjusted. If sponsor funding for the bus subsidy is not secured within six months, escalate to the board rather than draw further on the contingency. If booking turnaround exceeds a stated threshold, restore hours. Report quarterly to the board so the bridge funding is visible and the sunset is honoured, and keep the access data separate from the revenue data so a financially healthy year cannot mask an access failure.