When the Ohio Association of School Business Officials (OASBO) launched its inaugural School Finance Internship Program, Trumbull County Educational Service Center (ESC) was proud to be one of the participating ESCs. The program was designed to strengthen the pipeline for school finance professionals while giving students meaningful, hands-on experience in the field.
Trumbull County ESC had multiple qualified candidates apply for its OASBO-funded internship position. Given the strength of the candidate pool, the ESC Governing Board agreed to fund a second internship position using local resources, allowing the ESC to host two interns for the summer instead of one. The decision reflected the board's broader commitment to workforce development in school finance and gave more students access to the kind of hands-on experience the program was designed to provide.
Trumbull County ESC structured its internships around a two-week rotation, with interns spending three days a week at each participating district. Several districts volunteered to host interns over the course of the summer, and district treasurers consistently noted how impressed they were with the interns' work ethic, professionalism, and eagerness to learn.
At the ESC, I worked directly with the interns on a variety of assignments. In one exercise, I intentionally built an error into a task to see whether they would catch it, and they did. Other assignments had them reviewing files and invoices to confirm dates were accurate, giving them a view of the full process behind a transaction rather than just a single step. These examples are just a sample of the work they took on throughout the summer.
Interns also gained hands-on experience at participating districts. At Girard City Schools, Treasurer/CFO Maureen Lloyd had interns close inactive accounts within the district's accounting software, giving them real work rather than a simulation, while also including them in Zoom meetings regarding new software implementation. At Warren City Schools, Treasurer Karen Sciortino walked interns through the district's budgeting process, including making budget adjustments, and carried them through the full accounts payable process. At Bristol Local Schools, Treasurer/CFO Megan Titus kept the interns actively engaged in payroll, preparing board agenda materials, reviewing an employment contract, filing the T2 transportation report, and sitting in on a call with the IRS to resolve an agency error.
Districts also identified opportunities to strengthen the experience in future years, including exploring longer, more continuous placements at fewer sites. This gives the district Treasurer the opportunity to give an intern a true hands-on learning experience with real work being done.
Trumbull County ESC and its member school districts are enthusiastic about the program's future and hope to participate again, applying what they learned during the pilot year to shape a stronger experience for interns and districts alike. The experience reinforces a broader point echoed across the program's inaugural year: investing in structured, hands-on internships is a practical, low-risk way for ESCs and districts to build the next generation of school finance professionals.