(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Stuart Buck posted a question in the comments section of the post below, and Sherman Dorn likewise threw up the flag of skepticism on the $243,000 school district.
I went over to the website of the school district in question. The district has a school with 4 students, and another with 7, and spends a very large amount per pupil. However, they also have a charter school with a much larger number of students, which unhelpfully doesn’t report any financial data, which is odd, given that the districts do report such numbers.
Looking at the three district schools staffing, however, one can infer that the charter school has about 60 teachers, which is far more than the 3 district schools combined. The logical inference to draw therefore is that there is some sort of financial pass through set up where the charter school is getting a large percentage of the money.
So in essence, these two districts with unbelievably high spending per pupil numbers are likely strange outliers: small rural districts with big district charter schools which for some strange reason don’t count on the district ADM.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 