As Allovue's Solutions Engineer, Tyler helps prospective districts understand how Allovue can help improve and build upon existing budget and finance processes. Get to know Tyler and how he sees work at Allovue positively impacting student outcomes through careful and intentional financial planning.
I come from a public administration background, and before joining Allovue I spent six and a half years with the Syracuse City School District doing all things budget and finance for our schools and academic departments. So that’s everything from line-item budgets to quantifying large programmatic shifts. I also led the district’s enrollment forecasting process and managed position control at the site level.
As a Solutions Engineer, I help prospective districts understand how our tools can help improve and build upon existing budget and finance processes. I also get to spend time with our current customers to work through complex problems like developing budget and allocation structures.
From my work at Syracuse CSD I bring boots-on-the-ground experience of what it’s like to manage finances in a district’s central office. At Allovue, I’ve worked with districts of all different sizes across the country, which has given me a pretty good understanding of common pain points, which can range from position planning to facilitating collaboration in the budget planning process.
For me, it’s transparency—and that’s both between departments at the central office and between central offices and school sites. By using our tools, districts are not only able to understand how dollars are planned and allocated, but also the individual investments that the districts make for their students. On the back end, districts can see how their funds are actually being spent, so they can make sure that they’re spending the money according to their budget plan.
Everyone here is rowing the boat in the same direction—we all understand and believe in the core mission and vision, and we’re all interested in positively impacting student outcomes through careful and intentional financial planning.
I spent a lot of years in the trenches at Syracuse thinking about how New York State or federal policy was going to affect us in our district, but at Allovue I’ve seen how many districts are grappling with the same or similar issues. Some are impacted differently than others based on district size or socioeconomic factors, but really everyone has a similar set of problems, whether that’s districts in the same state or from state to state.
My favorite part of my job is getting to engage with different districts across the country and hear more about their struggles and things they’ve done well—I like being able to absorb best practices from everyone. I think this is the best perspective somebody could have in terms of being able to implement education finance plans and thinking about funding allocations. I get to see how so many people in so many different districts approach these problems, and it's an incredibly valuable experience.
I love to cook and barbecue. I have a Big Green Egg and my own pizza oven, so I spend a lot of time barbecuing and making pizza and coming up with all sorts of different crazy things.
My 65-pound pitbull is terrified of my children hiccuping. She will actually shake uncontrollably in the corner. So that’s pretty weird.