ONE MEEEEL YUN DOLLARS!

The Sun Prairie Area School District general budget for 2010-11 is about $73M.
You know the old adage....what does "a million of [something] look like"?
Here's what ONE MILLION DOLLARS buys (or what costs $1M) in the school district:

• The combined salaries (excluding benefits) of the top 9 highest paid administrators: Culver, Frei, Dawes, Luessman, Mikula, Hery, Murphy, Heipp, Ruggles)
• The combined salaries (excluding benefits) of all 28.5 administrators for July - Nov, 2010
• The combined salaries (excluding benefits) of the top 12 highest paid teachers
• The district cost -- for ONE MONTH -- of Health Insurance ($936,250)
• The 2010-11 district cost for Dental Insurance
• The budgeted amount which state aid exceeds cost (aka "profit") of the 4K program in 2011-12
• The 5 YEAR busing cost to transport 4 year olds to the 4K program (currently 133 kids) 
• The District budget for "General Supplies" for the 2010-11 school year
• The budgeted sum of "Extra-curricular" and "Summer School" salaries paid to district staff above and beyond their regular pay for 2010-11 (actually $1.1M)
• ONE TENTH of the 2010-11 district payment for Capital Debt
• 0.6% of the total district debt ($171M) as of June 30, 2011.
• The Capital Projects (building maintenance) budget for 2010-11
• The budgeted district cost for electricity for 2010-11
• SIX MONTHS of  budgeted district cost for SUBSTITUTE teachers for 2010-11

Pint-Sized Passengers -- Hefty Cost

The School Board will review SP4K busing tomorrow night.

This started out as a simple issue...a parent complained (rightfully) that their 4 year old was spending 2 hours a day on a bus for about 2.5 hours of instruction.  But...as with many school board issues, this one became another bloomin' onion....the more layers you peel away, the more information that comes clear.

Notable facts:

1. We, the people, and the school board were sold a bill of goods with the 4K program.  We were told that busing costs were projected (and budgeted) to be about $50K.  The number of students is as projected, yet the busing costs are FOUR TIMES higher than projected at just under $200K per year.

2. The cost to bus each student is a whopping $1963.34 per year, which is just more than FOUR times the average cost to bus a K-12 student.

3. There are FOUR times fewer kids per bus than for K-12 kids.

4. Here's the silver tuna...the school district expects to make a profit of about ONE MILLION dollars off the 4K program.  Shhhhh...keep that one under your hat.  They don't want YOU to know that...and they certainly don't want Scott Walker to find out that DPI is giving out $1M more for 4K than the program actually costs ...for ONE district

WTF?