Decentralization to lower levels of government is considered to improve public service provision. Nonetheless, decentralization outcomes are context and design dependent. This research investigates a school decentralization program that devolves authority to the school level in Brazil. The Direct Cash to School Program transfers cash direct to school management in order to improve school infrastructure and to increase community participation at school. The autonomous budget is managed by a school council constituted with community members. Considering non-linear rules in the Direct Cash to School Program, we explore two different aspects of this program within different school samples. Our main contribution is to disentangle the effects of having a school council to manage autonomous resources from the effects of additional funding. This analysis is essentially limited to small rural schools and our findings indicate that school council resource management improve school infrastructure and slightly enhance student performance. We also explore how local community educational level affects this result. Although infrastructure upgrading was generalized, investments directly benefiting students and improvement on student performance were restricted to schools with more educated community. The other relevant contribution is the investigation of whether additional locally managed resources improve school quality in an urban setting. Our findings suggest that increasing the resources under school council control do not increase overall parent participation at school. We also obtained that additional resources improve school equipment quality instead of physical infrastructure. In addition, we also consider how different local characteristics affect these outcomes. The higher the mothers education and the higher the community engagement at school, the greater the investment that directly benefit the students.