Accounting and Auditing

2007-2008 End of Year Pupil and Financial Report

MEMORANDUM

The Department collects a great amount of information and data from school districts to administer our programs and allow us to make informed policy decisions. I recognize the burden that this data collection places on you and your staff, and it is our obligation to continually review the information being requested to ensure that it is needed and that the benefits outweigh the costs.

I am pleased to announce that effective this year, we are eliminating two long-standing schedules from the end-of-year pupil and financial returns. After consultation with a number of you, we have determined that the limited uses of these two schedules can be accommodated through other existing data sources.

Schedule 11 - Pupil Membership Summary

Schedule 11 requires districts to calculate full-time equivalent (FTE) pupil membership by program area. The Department will continue to compute and publish total membership using the end-of-year Student Information Management System (SIMS) submission. The programmatic breakdown of pupil membership on Schedule 11 is used for only two purposes: calculation of the school choice regular education tuition rate (for the small number of districts that have not reached the $5000 cap), and the calculation of the vocational education non-resident tuition rate.

These limited applications of Schedule 11 data do not seem to justify the volume of work required by school staff to compute special education headcounts and full-time equivalent membership for each pupil with an Individualized Education Plan. Instead, the Department will use the available SIMS data on student program enrollment to calculate these rates.

Schedule 13 - Instructional Staff Data

Schedule 13 is currently used to compute and publish average teacher salaries. The new Educational Personnel Information Management System (EPIMS) data collection will provide the information we need to continue those calculations.

The definition of teachers used in EPIMS is comparable to that on Schedule 13. The main difference is that EPIMS represents a fall headcount, whereas Schedule 13 measured full-time equivalency across the year. This very minor difference will have little impact on the calculations and certainly does not justify having two separate collections of teacher data.

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We do not expect these changes to have any significant impact on districts, other than the reduction in the time required to prepare the end-of-year reports. If you have any questions concerning these changes, please contact associate commissioner Jeff Wulfson (781-338-6500 or jwulfson@doe.mass.edu) or school finance programs manager Roger Hatch (781-338-6527 or rhatch@doe.mass.edu). Thank you.