School Money and Performance Archives - Page 7 of 11

Trends in the News

School Money and Performance

All Posts

Education Week, 10/25/18

Could tax increases fix school funding problems? Some gubernatorial candidates think so

While the economy has been going strong in recent years, school funding has not caught up. And with 36 governors up for re-election next month, along with two-thirds of legislative seats across the states, the topic has been a hot one on the campaign trail this season. As a result, there is more of an appetite among the public, and even among candidates, for infusing school coffers with new tax revenues, a once-taboo subject for many. Hawaii, for example, is considering its first-ever property tax to address a teacher shortage amid sky-high housing prices. In this video, Education Week reporters Daarel Burnette and Kavitha Cardoza walk you through some of the school funding issues and debates dominating key campaigns.

School Money and Performance State Education Funding

ThinkProgress, 11/7/18

Voters approve additional public education funding in several states

Voters across the country on Tuesday made ballot decisions to help fund public schools, which are increasingly starved for resources. Most of them were successful, with six education initiatives passing overall, in places like Seattle, Washington; Georgia; Maryland; Montana; and two in the state of Maine… Four education initiatives were defeated in Colorado, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Utah.

School Money and Performance State Education Funding

Education Dive, 10/24/18

Music education can have tremendous payoff despite high costs

Music education is not an inexpensive offering for schools and districts. John Gerdy, founder and CEO of the nonprofit Music for Everyone, which supports music education in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, said its instrument repair program gave out $112,000 in grants in the spring of 2018. However, the group received $250,000 worth of requests. Schools that offer music programs have a 90.2% graduation rate, and a 93.9% attendance rate, as opposed to schools that don’t offer music education, which have a 72.9% graduation and 84.9% attendance rate, according to research quoted by the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) Foundation. Those numbers don’t surprise Danielle Roby, senior coordinator of music education and theater at Norfolk Public Schools in Virginia. The district has maintained a music program for all students — from kindergarten through 12th grade. Roby said students who participate in music in their district on average score 20% to 25% higher on tests and AP tests than students who aren’t involved in these programs.

School Money and Performance

Forbes, 10/26/18

What’s the cost of your child missing school? $47 a day in this California beach town

Manhattan Beach Unified School District, in Los Angeles’s tony South Bay, asks parents to make a $47 donation each time a student misses a day of school. Schools get state money based on average daily attendance in California, so the reasoning is that if families can afford to take kids out of class for vacations, they can afford to help the district make up the lost cash. Less than 5% of affluent Manhattan Beach’s 6,647 students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch. The daily attendance rate is around 98%, said Manhattan Beach Superintendent Mike Matthews. But the district still loses about $1 million a year for student absences.

School Money and Performance State Education Funding

Baltimore Brew, 10/25/18

State audit finds poor fiscal management issues at City Schools

The very first finding in a new state audit of Baltimore schools is eye-catching: Administrators failed to bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars that the school system was owed by outside organizations that it loaned its employees out to. Testing the cases of four loaned employees, the Office of Legislative Audits found the school system never billed the $352,500 it was owed for two of them. Equally striking: the exact same problem had been identified six years earlier, the last time the state conducted an audit of City Schools. Under-billing vendors, improperly awarding overtime, failing to select the lowest bidder in contract awards – the new audit reveals millions of dollars wasted as a result of these and other issues.

School Money and Performance

Education Week, 10/19/18

Hurricanes deal deep blow to schools’ finances

In Florida’s Panhandle, education leaders have started the strenuous work of cleaning up and repairing schools ravaged by Hurricane Michael earlier this month, but they are also running into a longer-term problem: steep cost estimates that could lead to mounting piles of bills. In New Hanover County, N.C., Superintendent Tim Markley dipped into the district’s estimated $15 million surplus to allocate up to $9 million to pay for schools to be cleaned up and readied for students to return. The saving grace for many districts could be whether they have cash on hand to hire contractors and prevent small problems from morphing into bigger, more expensive ones, said David Stephens, the executive director of risk management for the Florida School Boards Insurance Trust.

Local Education Funding School Money and Performance State Education Funding

The 74 Million, 10/10/18

With L.A. schools facing threats of fiscal oversight, district to cut 15 percent of local & office staff in emergency cost-cutting plan

L.A. Unified will eliminate $43 million in administrative salaries as part of an emergency cost-cutting plan to stave off its fiscal overseers. The cuts won’t be at school sites this year, but rather at the central and local district offices. The number of jobs that will be lost will be left up to each department, but they represent an overall 15 percent reduction. The job cuts are one half of a two-part strategy to right-size the district’s budget, which is projected to be on the verge of bankruptcy in two and a half years. They also come as the district is negotiating raises for teachers under the threat of a strike, and after it has approved salary increases of about 6 percent for two-thirds of its workforce.

Local Education Funding School Money and Performance

Chalkbeat, 9/27/18

How do you make a better school? The Detroit Children’s Fund says start with principals — and $85 million

One of Detroit’s largest education philanthropies, The Detroit Children’s Fund, is expanding its presence in the city’s schools, laying out plans to spend upwards of $85 million by 2025 to train educators, help successful schools expand, and open new ones. The Fund has gotten off to a quick start since the arrival of Jack Elsey, executive director of the Fund, spending $7 million in the last year on a wide range of projects, including a major grant to a high-performing charter school network, the formation of a city-led education commission, a campaign to attract teachers to Detroit, and a program that trains school principals and their top advisors to raise standards in their school.

School Money and Performance

NWI Times, 10/8/18

State committee chooses 8 measures to alert if a school district is in fiscal trouble

The financial status of all Indiana school corporations is poised to be evaluated next year using eight measures that are intended to indicate whether the district may require state assistance or intervention. The main indicators are: student enrollment trends; school fund balances; annual deficit or surplus; fund balances as a percentage of expenditures; a comparison of per-student tuition support with per-student expenditures; revenue by type; referendum funding relative to other revenue; and the share of general fund spending tied to salaries and benefits.

School Money and Performance

The 74 Million, 9/25/18

A school budget showdown in California: Why the state and county have warned Los Angeles Unified to get its financial house in order — or they’re taking over

The Los Angeles Unified School District board was jolted last month when a top county official showed up unannounced to say, You’re spending more money than you make and the savings you’ve been living off of are about to run out. L.A. Unified has to act now, and it has three choices, the officials said: Make more money, cut spending, or do both. Candi Clark, chief financial officer of the Los Angeles County Office of Education, who is legally required to act if a school district will run out of money within three years, has given L.A. Unified until Oct. 8 to adjust its budget, including detailing exactly how the district expects to make the $73 million in cuts it has vowed to carve out of the next two years’ budgets. If the county isn’t satisfied, it will “disapprove” the district’s budget. The next step is assigning a financial expert to assist the district, then imposing a fiscal adviser. The final step would be a state takeover, which happened in neighboring Compton in 1993 and in Inglewood in 2012.

Local Education Funding School Money and Performance