NASD Posts Budget Documents - Some Comments

Congratulations again to the NASD for making documents available online (building plans are forthcoming right?) with the posting of several budget related PDFs (view them all here).

I had been taking a look at the 65% focus on education proposal a reader noted in the comments last week. As a first attempt (I compared the current 06-07 budget against 01-02 before the new information became available so I added it on) I decided to include the following:

Instructional Spending: 2006-07 2007-08

• 1100 Regular Instruction: $22,150,212 $23,928,441
  
• 1200 Special Programs: $5,399,356 $6,077,290
  
• 1300 Vocational Education: $1,258,908 $1,326,566
  
• 1400 Other Instructional Programs: $690,783 $693,590
  
• 2100 Pupil Services $ 1,337,428 $1,445,269
  
• 2200 Instructional Staff: $683,449 $721,755
  

Total of these items: $ 31,520,449 $34,192,911
Total expenditures: $ 53,617,774 $59,380,798

% Instructional Spending: 58.79% vs. 57.58%

If you remove the 2000's (labeled support) : 55.02% and 53.93% respectively. I intentionally did not include the community college because this is primarily for post-secondary education, not k-12.

What these preliminary numbers (and approach) appears to show is a decline in the proposed budget on classroom spending that was not very close to the 65% goal this year.

Based on this NASD would need to cut more than $4 million from the budget to achieve 65% focus on direct classroom instruction.

Areas not directly related to classroom education:
2006-07 comparison to five years before 2007-08

• Debt Service: 7,885,188 (up from 3,591,936 five years ago 2001-2002) 8,536,590
  
• Transportation: 2,763,735 (up from 2,168,073 five years ago 2001-2002) 3,000,674
  

Interestingly, in the area of transportation the cost per student transported in 2001-02 was $534.27 compared to $636.22 in 2006-07, and $626.71 in 2007-08 (and yet many buses seem less than full pulling into Shafer each morning).

To evaluate the focus on staffing, which is obviously a big cost, I again looked at 2001-02 vs. 2006-07 and then 2007-08 proposal:

• Category: 2001/2 - 2006/7 (increase, % increase) 2007/8 proposal
  
• Teachers: 269 - 330.4 (+61.4 or 23%) 341.1
  
• Administration: 20 - 24.75 (+4.75 or 24%) 27.5
  
• Support Staff: 81.5 - 113.5 (+32 or 40%) 130.2
  
• IU Staff: 33.9 - 10.9 (-23 or -66%) 9.9
  
• Teamsters: 53 - 54.9 (+1.9 or 4%) 54.8
  

Staff was further divided by building:
2006-07 2007-08

• Building: total staff, classroom teachers (teachers as % of staff) (building enrollment)
  
• Shafer: 79.93 staff, 29 teachers (36.3%) 80.5, 29.5 (36.7%) 618 (10/06)
  
• Lower: 63.00 staff, 26.50 teachers (42.1%) 67.1, 30.0 (44.7%) 672 (10/06)
  
• Bushkill: 63.34 staff, 29 teachers (45.8%) 62.4, 29.0 (46.5%) 619 (10/06)
  
• MS: 118.30 staff, 47 teachers (39.7%) 121.9, 46.0 (37.7%) 1212 (budget)
  
• HS: 159.00 staff, 72.75 teachers(45.8%) 174.14, 76.75 (44.1%) 1645 (budget)

So what do you think? 21% of the budget is debt service and transportation, 56% is direct classroom and the remaining 23% are other district expenses. It was noted that this budget reflects last years plus every request. Does it seem that we need to start from nothing and build up, or is this a good process? Lots of numbers were released and I'm sure there are better number crunchers than myself, but it seems we can do better on eliminating overhead and focusing on the mission of educating the students. What do you think? What was missing, what should have been included? Take a look and share your thoughts!