Archived Information

School Finance: Chapter 70 Program

FY05 Expenditures Per Pupil By Function

This release of FY05 expenditures per pupil marks a significant improvement in the way Massachusetts school district spending is reported to the public. The new measure will eventually replace the "Day Program" statistics which have been published for decades. There are three particular reasons why the new calculations are more useful.

• They incorporate all school operating expenditures including those outside the general fund, such as grants and revolving accounts;

• they show how much is spent in specific functional areas; and

• they include the costs for local resident pupils who are being educated in schools outside the district.

Data source and timing

Per pupil expenditures for Fiscal Year 2005 are calculated from information provided on each district's End of Year Pupil and Financial Report (EOYPFR). The document is a comprehensive report of revenues and expenditures that occurred during the 2004-2005 school year.

Districts are required to hire auditing firms to verify the accuracy of the data on the EOYPFR. In addition, the Massachusetts Department of Education (DOE) conducts a careful review of the data during the months following the report's submission. If any changes are necessary, districts must file amendments.

Spending from all funds

The following funding sources are all included in the functional expenditure per pupil measure.

• school committee appropriations
• municipal appropriations outside the school committee budget that affect schools
• federal grants
• state grants
• circuit breaker funds
• private grants and gifts
• school choice and other tuition revolving funds
• athletic funds
• school lunch funds
• other local receipts such as rentals and insurance receipts

School committee and municipal school appropriations have always been the main component of the various per pupil spending measures published by DOE. In FY05, these appropriations made up 90 percent of all operating expenditures. Showing expenditures from all funding sources allows the public to see the complete picture. It also enhances the comparability and transparency of the numbers.

Functional categories

Categories of spending reported in the Expenditure Per Pupil calculations follow the order of the DOE chart of accounts:

Within these eleven functions, 63 sub-functions provide further detail. For example, "pupil services" can be broken down into spending on attendance, medical/health services, transportation, food services, athletics, student body activities, and school security.

The eleven functions match those incorporated in the changes to the Chapter 70 foundation budget calculations that occurred in FY07. Future analysis of the foundation budget should be made easier because of this.

Categories of spending that are not included in the Expenditure Per Pupil are:

Capital costs are typically excluded from per pupil expenditures. There is so much variation in where districts are in their building programs, that counting these costs would unfairly skew the results.

In-District And Out-of-District Spending and Pupils

Most school spending goes toward educating local resident pupils in local schools. However, about five percent of the nearly one million public school children in Massachusetts in FY05 were enrolled in publicly funded settings outside the district. School committees normally pay tuition for pupils at special education schools, charter schools, and other placements. Transportation costs often add to the expense.

The first ten functional categories are for services provided within the school district. In those categories, per pupil calculations are limited to the pupils enrolled at the district.

For the eleventh category (programs with other school districts), tuition and transportation outlays are divided by the number of pupils they are paying for.

The "total per pupil expenditure" includes all eleven categories of spending, and combines both groups of students.

Measuring enrollment: the concept of full-time equivalent average membership

The per pupil spending calculations published here compare spending, which occurs throughout the school year, to the average number of pupils, which normally fluctuates throughout the school year. The enrollment statistic used is called "full-time equivalent average membership."

Full-time equivalency refers to the percentage of time that students are enrolled during the school year. A pupil who arrives on November 1^st and is still enrolled at the end of the year, for example, would be assigned full-time equivalency of somewhere in the range of eight-tenths.

Comparisons with day program per pupil expenditure

For decades, DOE has published a "day program" per pupil expenditure which distinguishes costs per pupil in regular, special, vocational and until recently, bilingual education. The "total" day program per pupil expenditure adds them together and is a popular statistic which has been calculated using the same basic methodology since 1976.

The day program measure is less comprehensive than the functional spending measure shown here. It does not count spending from most "outside" funding sources. It does not reflect tuition for pupils being educated at private special education schools, charter schools, or other settings outside the district. As a result, the new per pupil expenditure tends to be markedly higher than the old one, by an average of 16.5 percent.

See a list of the differences.

Because the new per pupil expenditure is a more comprehensive perspective on spending, comparisons to previous years' day program numbers will not be valid.

Contacts

Questions and comments can be addressed to any of the following School Finance staff: