The Rules Are Changing for K-12. Your Business Office Should Lead the Way.
Enrollment is down. Budgets are tight. Buildings sit half-empty, and the people who know how everything works are retiring.
Any one of those would make for a hard year. In a recent column for School Business Now, longtime K-12 education partner Chuck Luchen argues that districts are facing seven of them at once. He also argues that the people best placed to lead the response are the ones who usually just manage the fallout: school business officials.
Seven pressures, all at once
Luchen starts from a blunt premise: the education model built for yesterday's economy is being tested by tomorrow's. He lists the realities behind it:
Declining birth rates and enrollment are cutting revenue and leaving schools with excess capacity.
Shrinking budgets are forcing harder choices about where every dollar goes.
Aging and underused facilities are becoming significant financial liabilities.
Experienced administrators are retiring, school business professionals among them, and taking institutional knowledge and capacity with them.
AI is rapidly reshaping the workforce, and Luchen says that shift has only begun.
Too many students reach college without the reading and math foundations they need to succeed.
America needs a new generation of skilled tradespeople.
None of these is new on its own. What's different now is that they're arriving together, and they make each other worse. Lower enrollment means less revenue and more empty space to maintain. Tighter budgets make it harder to replace the experience walking out the door. Luchen's summary is hard to argue with: "Doing more with less is no longer a strategy. It's a necessity."
The business office's job just got bigger
Luchen's central point is that school business officials shouldn't only help their districts survive this transition. They should help lead it.
The role, he writes, is expanding beyond balancing budgets and running operations. It now calls for long-term thinking about enrollment trends, facilities, staffing and resource allocation, and about whether today's spending lines up with what students and the community will need next.
What this means for your district: the person who sees every budget line, every building cost and every staffing projection is also the person best positioned to connect them. If your business official only appears at board meetings to present cuts, you're not using what they know.
Three questions worth asking out loud
Luchen poses three questions every district should be willing to ask itself:
Are we investing limited resources in programs that prepare students for tomorrow's workforce?
Are our underused facilities liabilities, or opportunities? He suggests they could house career and technical education (CTE), workforce training, or partnerships with community colleges and local industry.
Are we still operating the way we always have just because it's familiar?
The third question is the uncomfortable one, and it's usually where the savings are hiding.
Why the skilled trades can make financial sense
Luchen argues that embracing the skilled trades is good budgeting as well as good for students. Strong CTE and workforce programs can:
Create meaningful pathways for students
Help districts respond to changing enrollment
Strengthen community partnerships
Connect what schools teach with what the regional economy needs
For a district carrying empty classrooms and a local economy short on skilled workers, those two problems can start solving each other.
Where the money can come from
Traditional funding sources alone may no longer be enough, Luchen warns. He points to two other sources:
Federal and state grants for workforce development and career training, which he says are increasingly available.
Private companies facing critical workforce shortages, which are stepping forward with equipment, scholarships, training resources and partnerships.
Business officials, he says, can play a critical role in finding, evaluating and making the most of those opportunities.
Efficiency, before the experience retires
Finally, doing more with less will take greater efficiency across district operations. Luchen expects cooperative purchasing, shared services and strategic partnerships to keep growing in importance as experienced administrators retire and districts face more demands with fewer resources.
What this could look like in your district
Luchen doesn't name specific districts, but his argument points to a few concrete shifts:
A half-full school stops being just a line item to cut and becomes a candidate site for a CTE program or a community-college partnership.
A local employer that can't find enough skilled workers becomes a partner that contributes equipment, scholarships or training.
A contract you've renewed out of habit gets compared against a cooperative purchasing agreement or a shared-services arrangement with a neighboring district.
What district leaders should actually do
Here are five moves, ordered from fastest to longest-running:
Ask Luchen's three questions at your next cabinet meeting. It costs nothing, and the answers will tell you where to look first.
Map your underused space. List every building running below capacity and flag the ones that could host CTE, workforce training or a partner.
Make finding grants someone's job. Workforce development and career training grants won't apply for themselves. Put your business office in the room from the start.
Review purchasing and services for cooperative and shared options, and document how they work before the people who know those contracts retire.
Bring your business official into long-range planning, not just budget season. Enrollment, facilities, staffing and spending decisions work best as one plan.
As Luchen puts it: "The silver lining is there. We just have to be willing to see it."
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Source & credit
This post summarizes and builds on "Reality Check for Education Leaders: The Rules Are Changing" by Chuck Luchen, published in September 2026 in School Business Now, the publication of ASBO International, and adapted from Luchen's LinkedIn post. Luchen recently retired as National Strategic Account Director for Staples Business, where he led the company's K–12 education growth strategy over a 38-year career.
The seven realities, the three questions, and the points on skilled trades, funding and operational efficiency all come from his column. The "what this means" analysis and the action steps are ours. Thank you to Chuck Luchen and School Business Now for a clear-eyed look at where school business is headed.
