Safety in numbers
This handout (on Mike McMahon’s site) caught my eye at the Alameda for Better Schools (ABS) meeting last week. It’s a graph showing the Base Revenue Limit for each school in Unified School District in Alameda County. The Base Revenue Limit is the amount per student that the schools get from the state, and it is in equitably distributed to various schools in the state and the county.
What caught my attention, was that despite the way the issue has been framed during this debate, including by myself in a couple of conversations, the disparity is less “Alameda vs. All schools in the county” and more “Most of the schools in the county vs. Emeryville, Pleasanton and Dublin.”
Alameda is 15th (out of 16 districts) on the list of schools for amount of Base Revenue received, but look at the graph (or the grid below) and you’ll see that we’re not that far off most of the schools in the county. The bottom 11 districts are all within $100 per student of each other.
Here’s the Raw Data :
Take the average of the Schools in the Bottom 11 schools and we receive $55 per student less than the average. That’s a difference of $538,000 a year.
With all the talk of equality, we might want to look at what happens if every Alameda County student received the exact same amount. There are 200,614 students (total of the ADA for the 16 school districts) that schools in Alameda County get funding for. That funding totals a little over $1 Billion dollars. If the money was split completely evenly, the amount would be $5037. That’s $118 per student more than Alameda is receiving, and more than any of the Bottom 11 receive. In Alameda, that would produce an additional $1.2 million a year in revenue.
But most importantly, it would increase the funding at 11 of the counties 16 school districts representing 85% of all students. This says to me that we have a lot of allies in our quest to fix this problem. A lot of work has been done in the past, those of us new to this issue need to connect with people who have run through this process, learn what’s been done and jump in and help do what we can to make these changes.
Lori
February 28th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Thing is, Alameda County schools should be getting far more than rural counties, where the cost of living is much lower. And all California counties should be getting more than in other states, because cost of living here is generally higher than elsewhere, even rural areas. The whole fighting over a few hundred or even few thousand dollars a year per student doesn’t even address the woefully bleak funding outlook for California students.
Every Day I Write the Book « Stop, Drop and Roll
December 31st, 2007 at 9:28 am
[...] with the information and analysis SD&R provided on issues like the School Budget (here and here), the Union Pacific RR project to put rail gates across the Park Street Bridge (here, here and [...]