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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Let's walk through the math to see if it's actually special needs that's jacking the average up to $30k per student from the $11k being claimed...

DCPS overall budget numbers indicate that they are spending around $2.9 million for every 100 students in the system.

The argument in this thread has been that it only costs $11k per student, but the average is higher because of special needs.

Based on NCES data, typically around 13% of a student body will be special needs students.  So for every 100, typically 13 will be special needs, 87 will not.

If it's supposedly $11k per student normally, that means that with 87 non-special-needs students out of every 100 students that would entail a cost of $957,000 for 87 out of the $2.9 million being spent for 100, so presumably that means $1,943,000 is the cost of educating the remaining 13 special needs kids - which works out to be an average cost of $149,460 per special needs student.

Is that really the argument folks are making when they defend the $11k per student figure and point to the remainder of the cost as being because of special needs?[/quote]

Good math. Very poor reading comprehension. Lack of analysis.for example, where are DCPS overhead costs?[/quote]

Bingo!  It wasn't poor reading comprehension, I intentionally laid a trap there by demonstrating that it would have to take a whole lot more than just special needs kids to arrive at the average of $30k being spent per student in the DCPS system.  Yes, special needs kids contribute some additional cost but it's nowhere near enough to raise the average cost to $30k per student, so the argument that it's all because of special needs kids simply does not hold water.

So now we are back to my original point - as I said before, the DCPS school budget fact sheets showing $11k are grossly underreporting, as they do not include facility costs, overhead, textbooks, school lunches or any of the other additional costs incurred at each school - and many of those are big ticket items - whereas for charters, their budgets show EVERYTHING.

So, the attempt to compare cost per student based on an individual DCPS school budget sheet (in this case, $11k per student for Oyster) to cost per student based on a charter's budget (in this case, $18k per student for LAMB) is not valid - it's comparing apples to oranges - the more accurate comparison is the $30k per student for DCPS to the $18k per student for LAMB.  I'd also point out that LAMB's spend per student is higher than most charters as per their budget sheet they got outside grant money - not all charters get that much in grant money.[/quote]

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