School in Absentia
Life’s been a little too busy to actually post anything recently. But I didn’t want to drop the school budget as an issue, being that it is burning hot right now and decisions are going to be made in the coming weeks.
With all the discussion about Average Daily Attendance (ADA) funding from the state. I wanted to look at Alameda’s attendance, which is the ADA for a school, and how it compares to other districts in the county. The grid below is ranked in order of highest attendance (percentage of total enrollment). It show’s Alameda third from the bottom in the county. (I didn’t include tiny Sunol Unified <1000 students, or the charter schools).
Alameda ranks third from the bottom in our reported attendance rate (93.9% ), costing the district $3.2 million a year. The Alameda County average is 95.8%. If Alameda were to hit the average, the resulting income from the state would be approximately $650,000 annually (or about 1/3 of the current deficit).
You can get to the raw spreadsheet here. The information was gathered from here, as well as information on Mike McMahon’s excellent website.
The County and the State report our Baseline Revenue amount (what is funded from the state per student) differently, so I have included columns for both (for those completists out there).
This data doesn’t answer the question as to why we are so low compared to other schools. It be that AUSD is just more honest (or stringent) in reporting their information (I mean is it possible that Pleasanton and Dublin really have almost 99% attendance?) or it could be something else.
I know that the disctrict has tried to decrease absences in the past, but I wonder if they have asked around at the other districts about how they keep their numbers so high.
Mark
February 13th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
John,
At the Thursday meeting of AEF and ABS at Lum school, David Forbes said that our attendence was better than 93%, like 94 or 95%. He also said we have had campaigns like, bring your kid to school sick and take them home so we get the $ , and in practical reality it’s not worth putting more effort into that one. I don’t believe any district is getiing 99% attendance., but maybe.
Mike McMahon
February 17th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
The challenge with data available on the web is that it collects data from district with data processing systems and therefore the data fields are not similar. In addition, some calculations are approximation. ADA is an example. Since ADA is a ratio of attendance taken at two points of time there can be factors influencing (increasing/declining enrollment) which overstate the numbers. Here is a link to “actual” ADA numbers by school for the past few years.
http://mikemcmahon.info/ada.htm
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December 31st, 2007 at 9:27 am
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