Rochester City Schools are bringing back a tool to help parents and stakeholders guide spending in the district's strategic plan.

The RCSD hosted a meeting at the central office on West Broad Street on Monday in an effort to have a community conversation about their budget priorities for the next school year.

Those priorities include everything from increased teacher retention, improving facility utilization and lowering suspensions as well as chronic absenteeism.

They also re-introduced an online tool called the Balancing Act, meant to help parents and students guide those priorities and budgeting decisions.

"This tool actually assigns points to what it is that the stakeholders feel are most important to them, and in turn we can then say this is where or how we have allocated the amount of dollars that are generated from our budgets for our 2025-2026 budget," said Demario Strickland, interim superintendent of the Rochester City School District.

The district has used the budget simulator tool to help formulate budgets in previous years.

To take a look at the Balancing Act, head to the RCSD's website.