Per-Pupil Expenditures Excluding Other Commitments

View/download PPE Excluding Other Commitments chart (18KB)

WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING AT

This chart removes the “Other Commitments” category (and students served out-of-district) for a picture of the strictly educational costs within the district itself. The chart is re-sorted, high to low by per-pupil expenditure, shuffling the districts somewhat as some of the anomalous costs are removed. The value of the total bar is represented in real numbers over to the right, expressed as a per-pupil expenditure.

WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR

Please note how much one category’s removal makes a considerable difference in both the resulting per-pupil expenditure and in a district’s placement on the chart. Each district has decisions and circumstances that might strongly affect one category but not the others. For example, a rural district whose children travel great distances on a bus will have a relatively high per-pupil transportation cost; that district’s per-pupil expenditure will seem high when the Operations category is included and drop with seeming suddenness when it is removed.

New Shoreham

The New Shoreham district includes only Block Island, where conducting any and all business is more expensive than on the mainland. School lunch supplies, for example, must be ferried or flown to the island, incurring costs beyond the costs to a school to which a truck has easy access. New Shoreham’s costs are high across the board.

The career and technical programs and schools

Career and technical education is generally more expensive than regular education because of the specialized machinery, materials, shops, and so on. Districts with their own dedicated career and technical schools absorb the full cost into the district (although many of the buildings are owned and maintained by the state). Some districts share the cost of a career and technical center. Still others send their students to one of the two state-operated career and technical schools – Davies and the Met – which absorb the cost entirely for each student no matter where the child came from. Thus career and technical costs appear to be unevenly balanced among the districts.