- What we're going to offer our students in terms of programming and services
- How we're going to provide those programs and services, which has both staffing and facilities considerations
- How much we're going to invest in the purchase, construction and maintenance of our facilities and capital equipment
- How well we're going to compensate the teachers, staff, and administrators
Many times on this blog I have stated that 86% of our budget is spent on compensation and benefits. To clarify, we spend 86% of our General Fund budget on compensation and benefits. This is the part of our financial structure into which the property taxes generated by operating levies are collected, as well as the funding from the State of Ohio. It is from the General Fund that we pay almost all of the compensation and benefits, buy books, pay the utility bills, and fund the cost of the everyday operations of the district. It is the General Fund we're dealing with when Treasurer Brian Wilson presents the Five Year Forecast to the School Board. The General Fund Budget is $167 million for FY14, or 82% of the total budget*.
That means compensation and benefits are 71% of our overall annual spending, used to employ 1,683 people, all who directly or indirectly support the education of 15,838 students.
A comment often heard is that we're "top-heavy with administrators." A parent said that to me last week. As a candidate for the School Board, Brian Perry said this was something he wanted addressed, and a lot of voters agreed with him.
Maybe it's because I spent a lot of years in management, but I think the opposite might be true. I'm not sure we have enough administrators given the amount of work they have to do. In particular, I'm concerned about the principals and assistant principals because of the new workload placed on them by the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES).
Many of us - me included - would like there to be an accurate, fair and trusted methodology created for evaluating teacher effectiveness so that we can reward teachers accordingly. As my friend Marc Schare says (who was just re-elected to his third term on the Worthington School Board), under the current step-and-lane compensation system, some teachers are overpaid, and some are underpaid, and we can't fix either problem. OTES might be step towards getting there, but part of the cost is the time burden it puts on both our teachers and administrators.
So what is the makeup of our administrative team?
- Each of our 17 elementary buildings has one principal. Assistant principals at the elementary level were eliminated several years ago. These 17 principals supervise about 340 classroom teachers, plus many other professional staff, and are collectively responsible for 8,300 kids. That's a ratio of 20 regular classroom teachers and 488 students per administrator.
- Our 3 middle schools each have a principal and an assistant principal. I don't have the count of teachers at the middle school level, but there are 2,415 students, making the ratio 402 students per administrator.
- The three high schools each have one principal. Bradley and Darby each have 3 assistant principals, and Davidson has four. Together they are responsible for 4,803 students, for a ratio of 300 students per administrator.
- Each high school also has an athletic director.
- The district-wide School Age Child Care program has one director and four building level coordinators
- At the central office, we have 11 department directors, 20 supervisors (e.g. building maintenance, custodial, transportation), and five administrative assistants
- The superintendent, treasurer, and two assistant superintendents.
Another point of comparison is the administrative cost per student. The Ohio Dept of Education requires school districts to reports expenses according to standardized categories. Here's how we stack up compared to the other districts in Franklin County (data from the ODE's Cupp Report):
Notice that we have the lowest Administrative cost per pupil of any district in the county - by far.
Click to enlarge; source spreadsheet here |
So I don't agree that we have too many administrators, or that our management structure is too top-heavy. Compared to corporate environments, I think we run pretty thin.
That's not to say that I think our cost per student is exactly where it should be. That too is a matter of opinion, and can be answered only in the context of the strategic questions I pose at the top of this article. Some districts in our county spend a good deal more per student, such as Bexley, Grandview Heights, and Upper Arlington. This is in part due to the richness of their programming, and in part because of their compensation structure.
Columbus City Schools also spends a lot per student, I suspect in part because of the large amount of intervention services they must provide to their vast numbers of students from poverty. However, they also have an extremely high administrative cost.
We need to have an ongoing dialog about how much money we spend for what, and we also have to recognize that we are not of one mind in regard to the answers. But I hope we do agree that the relationship between the perceived quality of the school district and the taxes we must pay to create that quality influences the desirability of our community, and hence our property values.
The best situation would be to have low taxes and high perceived value. There are probably some districts which fall into this category, but I can't think of any. Indian Hill down near Cincinnati has a very low tax rate, but it also has the second highest property valuation per pupil in the state - virtually all of it residential. In spite of a very low tax rate, they still have enough money to spend $15,740 per student, with 84% of generated by local taxes.
The worst is to have high taxes and low perceived value. The districts who initiated the DeRolph case many years ago probably felt they were in this category, as they had fairly high property tax rates, but it generated little revenue because property values are so low. This is the situation which led the Ohio Supreme Court to declare that funding system as unconstitutional.
We are in neither extreme. Our taxes feel too high to many folks, but they're that way primarily because we're a relatively affluent bedroom community (meaning we get less state funding support than rural and urban districts) where residential development has been allowed to significantly outpace commercial development.
But we also have one of the most desirable school districts in the region. Yes, we can probably get by with less. The challenge is getting a majority of people to agree what we can do with less of so we can invest more for the future, and keep the desirability of our schools - and hence our community - high.
That's not to say that I think our cost per student is exactly where it should be. That too is a matter of opinion, and can be answered only in the context of the strategic questions I pose at the top of this article. Some districts in our county spend a good deal more per student, such as Bexley, Grandview Heights, and Upper Arlington. This is in part due to the richness of their programming, and in part because of their compensation structure.
Columbus City Schools also spends a lot per student, I suspect in part because of the large amount of intervention services they must provide to their vast numbers of students from poverty. However, they also have an extremely high administrative cost.
We need to have an ongoing dialog about how much money we spend for what, and we also have to recognize that we are not of one mind in regard to the answers. But I hope we do agree that the relationship between the perceived quality of the school district and the taxes we must pay to create that quality influences the desirability of our community, and hence our property values.
The best situation would be to have low taxes and high perceived value. There are probably some districts which fall into this category, but I can't think of any. Indian Hill down near Cincinnati has a very low tax rate, but it also has the second highest property valuation per pupil in the state - virtually all of it residential. In spite of a very low tax rate, they still have enough money to spend $15,740 per student, with 84% of generated by local taxes.
The worst is to have high taxes and low perceived value. The districts who initiated the DeRolph case many years ago probably felt they were in this category, as they had fairly high property tax rates, but it generated little revenue because property values are so low. This is the situation which led the Ohio Supreme Court to declare that funding system as unconstitutional.
We are in neither extreme. Our taxes feel too high to many folks, but they're that way primarily because we're a relatively affluent bedroom community (meaning we get less state funding support than rural and urban districts) where residential development has been allowed to significantly outpace commercial development.
But we also have one of the most desirable school districts in the region. Yes, we can probably get by with less. The challenge is getting a majority of people to agree what we can do with less of so we can invest more for the future, and keep the desirability of our schools - and hence our community - high.
* The budget actually says $227 million. The difference is due to the way our medical benefits are accounted for, with there being a $25 million expense recorded to the General Fund which is then recorded as revenue to the Proprietary Funds, which is where we pay out actual medical expenses for our employees. Nothing sneaky, just the way the accounting works for government entities. For those of us used to corporate accounting, it makes sense to wash this out, just as would be done when rolling up a subsidiary's books to the parent.