State Report Card

Per-Pupil Expenditures Including Other Commitments

View/download Per Pupil Expenditures Including Other Commitments and Students Served Out-of-District (PDF format, 42 KB)

WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING AT

The chart to your left shows each district, or Local Education Authority (LEA) – which for these purposes includes two state-operated schools, Davies and the Metropolitan Career and Technical Center (the “Met”). The bar as a whole represents 100% of the expenditures for that LEA broken down by the five categories indicated in the legend. The total dollars are divided by the ADM of public-school students on whom those dollars are spent, to arrive at a per-pupil expenditure that includes everything. The districts are sorted high to low by per-pupil expenditure.

WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR

We draw your attention to the substantial differences in each district’s Other Commitments category to show how the general per-pupil expenditure masks unavoidable expenses peculiar to individual districts. These expenses include costs for district students taught outside of the district, debt service for facilities construction and repair, capital projects, retiree benefits and community service operations such as adult continuing education, child care centers, and so on. (See below for specific examples.)

Quick definitions of the other four major In$ite categories

• Instruction includes all face-to-face teaching, substitutes, and all instruction-related classroom materials.
• Instructional support refers to pupil support, such as guidance, library, extracurricular, and health services; teacher support, which includes professional development; and program support, which refers to evaluators, therapists, psychologists, and so on.
• Operations includes transportation, food service, safety, facilities, and all business services.
• Leadership includes principals, superintendents, costs associated with school committees, legal, and secretarial.
  

Examples of Other Commitments

The inclusion of Other Commitments presents the full picture of district costs even though the expenses in this catch-all category have little to do with one another. For example, certain small towns (Little Compton and Jamestown) do not have high schools of their own. Their older students are counted as “out of district” because they are bused to other public schools to which the district pays a tuition. Some districts carry sizable debt for the building of school facilities, and these costs increase the per-pupil cost, ranging from $23 to $1,051. Two districts could each spend about $1.2 million for debt service, yet a larger district’s debt service per pupil could have been $189, compared with the smaller district’s $738. Major repairs or capital improvements in any given year will drive up any small district’s per-pupil cost.