Fixes to Kentucky’s school-level financial reports don’t fix much – Federal dollars don't add up

Following the release several weeks ago of the Bluegrass Institute’s Policy Point on MISCALCULATING ACCOUNTABILITY, Kentucky’s School Financial Reports Just Don’t Add Up, the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) issued a revised Excel spreadsheet with school level spending per student.

While it’s nice to have the obvious errors for Paris Middle School and several Hardin County schools finally fixed (the corrections took more than four months to appear from the time I originally notified the KDE about these problems), the unfortunate reality is that the vast majority of problems discussed in our Policy Point remain, as I explain in this series of “Fixes” blogs. This new blog series is built around a new BIPPS Excel spreadsheet created to analyze the revised data.

 Our revised spreadsheet contains the updated data downloaded from the KDE along with additional tabs that show various analyses of that data done in same way used to create the Policy Point’s associated Excel spreadsheet.

 This is the third blog in our series about the revised data. To summarize so far, the first blog in the series points out that the overall amount of data available remains highly inadequate.

 The second blog discusses the revised listing of total spending per pupil in each school.

These two blogs show most of the concerns we mentioned in the Policy Point remain valid. In fact, I was able to just quote a major part of the Policy Point’s comments in the second blog as those comments apply equally well to the new Excel spreadsheet.

In today’s blog we look at a recalculation of the item discussed on Pages 9 and 10 in the Policy Point regarding the actual sums for each school of reported federal spending for Personnel and Non-Personnel items compared to the KDE’s spreadsheet’s listed total for all federal spending.

An extract of that original Excel spreadsheet’s tab was posted in Table 4 in the Policy Note on Page 10. The table below is like that Table 4 and summarizes the top and bottom portions of our full revised Excel tab for this analysis.

The big changes in this table are that several Hardin County schools that were listed in Table 4 no longer appear near the top or bottom of the revised table.

However, Cumberland County High School is still listed at the very bottom of the revised table and still shows a major disagreement between the actual sum of the federal Personnel and the Non-Personnel spending and the reported supposed total. Added together, the Personnel and Non-Personnel figures for Cumberland County High add up to only $3,823 per pupil. But, the KDE’s Excel spreadsheet shows the total federal spending for this school was $16,713 per pupil. If so, where did the extra $12,890 come from? Why isn’t this massive additional funding shown in the breakdown? How can we use this data intelligently?

At the top of the revised federal sum checks is Williamstown Elementary School, which shows federal dollar spending for personnel by itself was $14,639 per pupil although the overall total federal spending per pupil is listed as only $1,638 per pupil. That obviously makes no sense, either.

So, when we examine the federal spending reports in the KDE’s Excel spreadsheet, as we said in the title of our Policy Point, the school financial reports just don’t add up.