Two weeks ago, the school board and district had their first 2010-11 "budget summit" meeting. In typical rah-rah fashion, the district slide show painted the district in the best possible light. They offered this slide:
This data purports to show that Sun Prairie exercises great fiscal restraint when compared to the other 15 Dane County school districts. 14th lowest "spending" out of the 16 districts!Step 1 is to show ALL the data. The DPI website doesn't offer any reports on "spending". It DOES offer a report called "shared costs", which is the sum of general fund (basic district operations) plus the debt service amounts divided by the enrollment. DPI also offers "comparative cost" and "comparative revenue" reports. The comparative cost report is broken down into actual education costs, transportation costs, facility costs, and even food and community service costs per student. This is what that picture looks like for the 16 Dane County schools:
The problem: Sun Prairie is not LIKE the other Dane County school districts. It's like comparing apples to pineapples! Of them, we bear resemblance only to (grrr) Middleton-Cross Plains.
Solution: Stop comparing apples to pineapples. Four (4) of the 16 Dane County school districts have less than 1000 students! Madison has nearly FIVE times our enrollment. So why don't we compare the 20 school districts closest to us in size? Wouldn't that allow us to better evaluate our position?
We looked at the 20 schools closest to SPASD in size (10 bigger, 10 smaller). Take a look at how Sun Prairie stacks up in the "Shared Costs per Student" spectrum when comparing apples to apples:
Gee whiz! We went from 14th out of 16 to 6th out of 21! Son of a gun! Note also that we rank 4th in terms of Revenue Limit per student (how much money we are allowed to spend) and 3rd highest in terms of mill rate. Now to be fair...as we have said before, mill rate doesn't mean much without looking at the median property value per district. Certainly, some of these districts have median house values greater than Sun Prairie...like Oak Creek-Franklin. But our mill rate is nearly 30% higher than theirs! If our median house value is $235K, that would mean that for us to be a "more expensive" district, the median house value in Oak Creek would have to be just over $300K. Is it?
Gee whiz! We went from 14th out of 16 to 6th out of 21! Son of a gun! Note also that we rank 4th in terms of Revenue Limit per student (how much money we are allowed to spend) and 3rd highest in terms of mill rate. Now to be fair...as we have said before, mill rate doesn't mean much without looking at the median property value per district. Certainly, some of these districts have median house values greater than Sun Prairie...like Oak Creek-Franklin. But our mill rate is nearly 30% higher than theirs! If our median house value is $235K, that would mean that for us to be a "more expensive" district, the median house value in Oak Creek would have to be just over $300K. Is it?
Not even close. In 2008 the median house price was --surprise, the same as ours---only $235K. That would mean, using these figures, a median value house in Oak Creek would pay $1818 in school taxes, whereas in Sun Prairie, a median home would pay $2350.
See how things look when you compare things on a level playing field?
Let's look at Property Tax Levy per student and how we compare to the 20 school districts of similar size.
My, my...#4 with a bullet! Any wonder why the district didn't show THAT slide?
Hmmm...here we move down one notch to 5th place, but we still rank right up there in the top 20-25%...most definitely not in the bottom 10-15% as Phil Frei's numbers would lead one to believe.
See how things look when you compare things on a level playing field?
Let's look at Property Tax Levy per student and how we compare to the 20 school districts of similar size.
My, my...#4 with a bullet! Any wonder why the district didn't show THAT slide?Last but not least, let's look at the "total education cost" per student. Note that this is really just salaries and fringes. This figure does not include transportation costs, facility costs, or food/community service costs. Just what it costs to educate our kids.
Hmmm...here we move down one notch to 5th place, but we still rank right up there in the top 20-25%...most definitely not in the bottom 10-15% as Phil Frei's numbers would lead one to believe.
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