[Spinnaker_]

Everyone is focused on teacher salary, but the national average expenditure per student was $16,281. In New York it was $30,876. This seems insane.

A handful of student's expenditure covers a teacher's salary. Where does the expenditure for the other 25 kids in the class go?

[zie]

School districts spend most of their money on humans.

There is a LOT of infrastructure. The schools have to be built, they have to be staffed(there is a fair bit of support staff, to keep the teachers in classrooms teaching).

From cafeteria workers and janitors to IT people and payroll, back office and grant people. High Schools might have a few thousand students that congregate there every single day, that's a small town. Our local high school's have a dedicated full-time HVAC person for instance, just to keep the insane temperatures outside from getting into the classrooms.

[legitster]

I was able to find a breakdown from a few years ago per student:

https://www.nycenet.edu/offices/d_chanc_oper/budget/dbor/sbe...

[peterfirefly]

It doesn't say how much is for normal instruction of normal kids, how much is zoo keeping of unruly kids, how much is remedial teaching of the slow kids (or sometimes the ones who had other reasons for being behind), how much is AP teaching (or better) for the smart kids.

It just says:

                                    Pct of  Per
                             Pct of Public  Student
                Total        Exp.   School  Amount
    i. Teachers $10,124,379  32.1%  37.7%   $9,914

(Edit: fix tab to space conversion/layout)

[vundercind]

1) buildings, air conditioning, buses and bus drivers, lunches, “resource officers”, the second(!) assistant superintendent’s second(!) secretary (true story, not a big district either) et c.

2) Some kids with certain needs require one entire staff member with them at all times. There may be a few of these in a given school.

3) Somewhat more require something like 1/5-1/10 of one or (more often) two staff members’ time (think “special ed” rooms)

4) These figures may include serious outliers. Selective public schools often have very high per-pupil spending, and schools attached to correctional institutions sometimes register six figures of spending per student, to pick a couple examples.

TL;DR if we could suss out what’s actually spent on a “normal” student at a “normal” school, it would be way lower.

[zie]

> the second(!) assistant superintendent’s second(!) secretary (true story, not a big district either)

I bet if you go ask what those secretaries actually do during their day, you will find they are very busy doing lots of stuff that has nothing to do with the traditional "secretary" role. It was probably the only way to get it stuffed into the budget, so the actual work they do can get done.

Certainly some Administrators have actual secretaries that do traditional secretary duties, but they are few and far between in my experience. Most of the ones I've met do lots and lots of other things totally un-related.

As for multiple Asst Superintendents, that's totally normal, usually one is in charge of "back office" payroll, HR, the business end of things and another is in charge of education type things. At larger districts you might have 1/2 a dozen of them, all specializing in a particular area.