How much do Kentucky’s school districts really spend per pupil?

How much does your school district really spend per pupil on education? I wish I could tell you.

Want to know why I am bewildered? Click the “Read more” link.

But, be prepared to be surprised. The sometimes enormous discrepancies between two of the Kentucky Department of Education’s online financial reports are absolutely shocking. Even school board members might be getting fooled. And, in at least one case the discrepancy amounts to a total error on the order of $25 million in spending in just one year for just one school district!

This story began on November 28, 2017 when Chris Kolb, a member of the Jefferson County Board of Education, decided to take some shots at another Op-Ed in the Courier-Journal.

The Kolb tiff centered on whether or not the Kentucky Board of Education should move in to take over the troubled Jefferson County School System. Along the way, Kolb discussed per pupil spending data for Jefferson County and the Breckinridge County school systems, claiming that Breckinridge spends more per pupil than Jefferson County does.

I wondered about that, but when I tried the links to Kolb’s finance data in the Courier’s article, those links didn’t work.

So, I decided to look first at the annual Revenue and Expenditures (R & E) Reports from the Kentucky Department of Education (available from links here – scroll down to the Annual Financial Revenues and Expenditures section). Since the latest R & E Report covered 2015-16, I looked at that first. But, I couldn’t find anything even close to the spending figure Kolb cited for Breckinridge County. Even worse, according to the R & E report, Breckinridge County actually spent a lot less than Jefferson County that year, $13,422 per pupil versus $14,779.Was Kolb totally out to lunch?

Wondering about that, I decided to take a look at the Kentucky School Report Cards web site information because Kolb’s broken links involved that web area. I went to the 2015-16 report card’s Data Sets tab and then accessed the FINANCE excel spreadsheet. This includes line items for “Total Expenditures per Pupil” for each school district.

All of a sudden, something startling became apparent. Kolb had actually quoted the right figure for Breckinridge County’s per pupil spending according to the Kentucky School Report Cards, and the report card Excel also showed Jefferson County spending slightly less, just as Kolb charged.

But, the report card figures for total per pupil spending didn’t agree at all with the R & E report data for these two districts.

While waiting for the Kentucky Department of Education to get back to me with an explanation, I decided to look at the difference in total per pupil spending for all 173 districts in the state.

That REALLY got interesting!

I found over 40 districts with well over a $1,000 difference in total per pupil spending according to my comparison.

The worst case was the Taylor County School District. According to the R & E report, Taylor County spent $12,275 per pupil in Fiscal Year 2016 (the 2015-16 term). But, the Kentucky School Report Card Excel says the district spent a whopping $22,374 per student. The difference is $10,099!The same school report cards web site says Taylor County enrolls about 2,500 students. Multiply that by $10,099 and we are talking about an uncertainty about how much this district really spends each year on the order of $25 million! How’s that old saying go about a million here, a million there?

Here’s another curious thing. The report card web site’s Excel spreadsheet indicates that the total expenditures per pupil figures are “Revenue and Expenditures” data. You would think the numbers should agree with the department’s actual R & E report, but clearly that isn’t the case.

So, how does anyone know what we are really spending on our kids – school board members included? This is just not right.

Anyway, I’m still waiting for the Kentucky Department of Education to get back to me about what is going on. Right now, however, it looks like even school board members in Kentucky’s largest school system might not have a handle on how much we are spending on our schools, and that is a major concern, as well.

And, if you want to see my Excel spreadsheet that shows the difference in spending reported for your district in these two reports, just click here.