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Competition To Help Oakland Schools Erase Debt

Friday, March 02, 2007

Mar. 1 - KGO (KGO) -- In a first of its kind competition today, top MBA students from across the country are meeting on the UC Berkeley campus to brainstorm a new financial plan for Oakland Unified School District's budgeting nightmare. The 24-hour contest will have some real life applications.

Berkeley, UCLA, MIT, Northwestern -- the cream of the crop. Twenty-eight top MBA students competing with each other to solve the financial problems plaguing the Oakland Unified Schools. The district has been managed by the state since 2003.

Barak Ben-Gal, Budget Director, Oakland Unified Schools: "Seven teams from some of the best schools in the entire country. Some of the best minds sitting around together discussing for the next 24 hours. I can't wait to see what presentations they give me tomorrow so that I can take it back to the district and try making some of these changes as soon as we can."

Barak Ben-Gal is a Stanford MBA graduate who now manages the budget for Oakland schools. A current UC Berkeley MBA student came up with the idea for this competition.

Anna Utgoff, Haas School of Business Student: "School districts are organizations with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues, and the people who lead them face really interesting strategic challenges that professional students like yourselves can really have valuable input into."

What's innovative about this competition is harnessing the brainpower of these top business scholars to help the public sector instead of fortune 500 companies.

A few were willing to share their fresh ideas.

Shaolee Sen, Competitor, Haas School of Business: "We're creating easier systems, and IT systems, to help staff at schools in the Oakland School District use results-based budgeting, which is what the case is about, in creating better achievement outcomes for their students."

Galen Li, Competitor, MIT Sloan School of Mgmt.: "The principals, actually a lot of them don't have the financial background and they don't have the interest in dealing with budgeting, so we think if we have a couple specialized people in the district to go to each of the principals in the district to do that process, that that would actually save on costs."

The competitors hunkered down into conference rooms to work through the night. The winner will be announced Friday at noon.

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