Coral Gables Historical Archive
The Times
Thursday, November 3, 1960, page 35 (of 63)
The page
The text of this pageRead by computer from the scan, so some words may be wrong. The page picture is the original.
YOUR SCHOOL-BUDGET WORK SHEET
Get Out Your Pencil and Paper and Figure Where Your Town Stands... On Cost Per Pupil (Including all costs except pupil transportation, tuition paid to other school districts, debt service, and capital outlay) The Average U.S. School District Spends | $292 The "Top Tenth" of U.S. School Districts Spends | $431 The "Top Tenth" In Your Geographical Region Spends (see accompanying table) | [ ] The Median of 62 Suburban Towns Spends | $683 Your Town Spends | [ ] (Here's what to ask your School Board for: "Net Current Expenditure per Weighted Elementary Pupil Unit," calculated as follows-Each child in average daily attendance (ADA) grades K-6 in the district's schools counts as one weighted unit; each child in ADA grades 7-12 is counted as 1.3 weighted units-this adjustment takes into account the higher costs of educating secondary students as compared to elementary ones. School systems with fewer than 316 in ADA grades K-6, and fewer than 695 in grades 7-12 are initially adjusted for increased small-school costs (sparsity of school population) as reported in Mort and Reusser, Public School Finance, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1951,p.74.) On Teachers' Pay (Average) The Average U.S. School District Pays | $5,144 The "Top Tenth" of U.S. School Districts Pays | $6,674 The "Top Tenth" In Your Geographical Region Pays | [ ] The Median of 62 Suburban Towns Pays | $6,587 Your Town Pays | [ ] (Here's what to ask your School Board for: Average pay of all classroom teachers, principals, supervisors, librarians, audio-visual, guidance, psychological, and television instructional personnel.) On Pupil-Teacher Ratio In the Average U.S. School District | 24.2-1 In the "Top Tenth" of U.S. School Districts | 20.3-1 In the "Top Tenth" In Your Geographical Region | [ ] In the Median of 62 Selected Suburban Schools | 17-1 In Your Schools | [ ] (Here's what to ask your school board for: Ratio of pupils to all members of the instructional staff, including teachers, principals, assistants, directors, supervisors, psychologists, guidance specialists, teachers in all special subjects, and school nurses-excluding clerks, secretaries, bus drivers, custodians, maintenance men, superintendents, and their assistants.)
ARE SCHOOL COSTS
Here's a way to compare your town's operating budget BY LUIS AND JO VILLALON THE VOICE of the teacher, the educational television set, and the interroom squawk-box are heard in the land as usual. But, this year, a dark cloud considerably larger than a skinflint's hand is hovering over the sleek, single-storied edifices dedicated to the instruction of our young. In town after town, tax bills are proving more potent than PTA tracts, and the annual school budget is running into opposition too stiff to be overcome by parents' phalanxes. Even in Great Neck, Long Island, the home of perhaps the lushest school system in the country, with townsfolk conditioned for years by an effective school public-relations program-as well as by effective schools-the budget was tossed out and tailored down to suit the dollar-conscious. In Fairfield, Connecticut, an independent taxpayers' revolt won a town-wide referendum and blocked construction of a badly needed high school. In town after town, harder and harder questions are being asked about school-operating expenditures. The opposition claims that suburban towns have "gone crazy" trying to provide public schools of private-school quality for their youngsters. They assert that teachers, no longer underpaid, are being pampered and spoiled with too small classes and too short hours. They maintain that too large a percentage of school funds are going into brick and mortar and not enough into readin,' writin,' and 'rithmetic. The Cassandras conclude that school costs are too high-too high for the need, and too high for residential communities to maintain their solvency. There's Growing Concern All PTA veterans are familiar with these objections. But this year there's a difference. There are, always, the customary critics of school expenditures-the town's big property owners who are most hurt by every mill increase in the tax rate, and the standpatters who are convinced that the little red schoolhouse is quite good enough for their children and other people's. But today they are being joined by a good many ordinary citizens, even ones with children in the schools, who are sincerely concerned with their ability to afford continuing residence in their school-happy towns. Is this growing concern justified? Are America's residential towns, largely without benefit of industrial-tax bonanzas, really overspending? Are their residents being asked to spend too large a proportion of their incomes for schooling? Has suburban education gotten plain out of hand? The ordinary citizen, trying to get answers for himself, is quite likely to find himself drowned in a sea of gobbledygook. He or she will be faced with an impossible choice between black and white-between the bargain-counter economies [?offered?] by the conservatives, and the glittering "nothing-is-too-good-for-our-children" slogans. The answer to "How high is too high?" in regard to school costs is, of course, neither black nor white. There is no easy way to determine whether an individual town is paying too much for too little education-or even whether it is paying too much for the best possible education. It is, however, useless to deny that there is so correlation between school-system quality [?&?] per-pupil cost. So your town's expenditure per pupil and teaching-salary level, as well as a number of other measurable factors, will tell you something about how adequate a job is being done. Another clue to "How high is too high?" in reference to a specific town will be found by comparing your school costs with those in similar communities. Suburban Schools Come High The economy forces like to use national averages because, including as they do Red Clay, Mississippi and Single Stick, Vermont, they always look very low compared with a financially healthy suburban town's expenditures. But the more significant measure is the average cost in towns like yours and the specific expenditures of individual towns that have the same characteristics as your town, financial and otherwise. The school-budget work sheets accompanying this article will help you get some of these answers with a minimum of research on your part. Critics and defenders of suburban school budgets, alike, might as well start off with a few facts that can't be questioned. Suburban residential towns do, on average, spend considerably more to educate each of their pupils than do even the most liberal tenth of all U.S. towns. While there is no single national index of per-pupil costs that allows direct comparisons, there are, fortunately, several independent cost studies that can be compared if one is not too particular about the accuracy of the last two pennies. Using studies made by School Management Magazine and by the Metropolitan School Study Council of Columbia University, both in 1960, the facts are about as follows: The average expenditure of a group of sixty-two metropolitan-area schools, including such typical residential towns as Shaker Heights, Ohio; Lake Forest, Illinois; Abington, Pennsylvania; Greenwich, Connecticut; Montclair, New Jersey; and Great Neck and Manhasset, New York, comes to almost $695 per-pupil per year. This compares with an average expenditure per pupil, figured on the same basis, of $431 for the top ten per cent of all school districts in the nation (the national average expenditure is $292). So, there's no question about it-the suburban family is doling out