Balancing the Teacher Prep Travel Budget

Dr. Jan Miller:

And at that time, our travel budget was in the red. It was really, really in the red by like $60,000. So at our institution, I’m not sure how yours operates the budget, but at the time we were allocated x number of dollars to go do clinical visits.

And also during this time, we saw an enrollment peak. So we obviously had more candidates in the field, more candidates to do observations that meant we are in rural Alabama, but we had candidates all over the state of Alabama. Sometimes we would have to travel, two hours to go watch a presentation, a lesson, to provide feedback and then drive back. And so as our enrollment grew, we required three visits, but our budget did not increase. So you can do the math. We’re traveling more, doing more observations, and we have more students. So obviously our budget quickly went into the red. So our administration at the University said, Jan, you have to get this under control. You’ve got to find a solution. We can’t have this budget in the whole of $60,000.

So what are you going to do? So we knew when we went to a AACTE that was on the top of our list to try to find ideas and ways that we could make clinical experiences the way it needed to be with good feedback, with up-to-date information and to try to make that the best it could be. But yet, how would we do that if we couldn’t travel and be in the face-to-face experience as we were used to? And so we found GoReact and we were happy to say that once we formed the partnership with GoReact and we launched GoReact, we created our accounts for our students and our professors and our adjuncts. It didn’t take long until we started seeing a huge savings. Within two or three years, we were easily able to reverse that red budget up until the green. And so now, it’s because of GoReact that we were able to save. Our budget is now not in the red.