Is there anything that you want to know, but you don't know where to go to ask the question? Do you have an idea as to how the Milford School District can improve? If so, then please contact me and I'll try to help out.
You can contact me by email at pauldargie@aol.com, or you can post a question or comment on this blog. Blog postings can be anonymous.
In general I will try to get an answer for you, but there are some things that I won't be able to get into. The School Board is part of the dispute process for the School District, so I can't get involved in any complaints that may eventually require a review by the board. An example of this would be a complaint about a specific teacher. These types of issues need to be addressed through the chain of command to insure fairness to all parties.
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5 comments:
What is the cost of educating one student in the Milford public schools?
When the Kindergarten issue is explored, I would assume that the district would have to make predictions about future enrollment. How would that figure be determined? Would you look at the number of Milford children attending private Ks in the area and then assume there are another 5, 10, 25% of children who are kept home and not enrolled in any program? The latter is pretty important data to have when you start talking about # of classrooms needed.
A. The state has a method for calculating the average cost per pupil. There are formulas that are followed that include or exclude various items to get to the number. A listing of the the per pupil costs for all districts for the 2005-2006 school year can be found at this url:
http://tinyurl.com/349srb
The state uses this process to try to make comparisons between districts as uniform as possible. This is mainly a good thing, but does not always paint a complete picture.
One example of how this distorts the published figure is that the state excludes payments to other school districts or private schools from the calculation. This tends to inflate the Milford numbers because we keep many students in-district at the Sage school that would be an excluded out-of-district expense at most other districts. We save a lot of money by keeping the students in-district, but our published cost per student is higher.
These are Milford's figures for the 05-06 school year:
School: Milford-State Avg
Elem: $9,920-$10,108
Mid: $9,291-$9,208
High $10,291-$9,431
Total $9,840-$9,710
This charts shows the cost trends for the past ten years:
School
Year Milford State % of State
97-98 $6394 $5781 111%
98-99 $6777 $6009 113%
99-00 $6924 $6357 109%
00-01 $7031 $6738 104%
01-02 $7681 $7233 106%
02-03 $8138 $7809 104%
03-04 $8993 $8496 106%
04-05 $9364 $9099 103%
05-06 $9840 $9710 101%
You can see that Milford's cost per pupil is slightly above the state average. While our costs have grown considerably in recent years (mainly due to health benefit increases), our percentage increases have tended to be less than the state average increase resulting in Milford's cost per pupil getting closer to the state average.
The actual cost per pupil is higher when the excluded items are added back in to the calculation. The state average goes to $12,108. I don't have the Milford number easily available since it is not something that we use. It could be derived from the state filings that we do each year, but I'm not going to bother doing the calculation since it really doesn't come into play in doing comparisons.
B. The School Board does an enrollment forecast each year as an input into the budget development process. The forecast for grades 2-12 is based on using current enrollments and historical trends on cohort survival rates. For example, if for the past few years we have averaged an increase of 2 students when grade 3 has moved to grade 4 the following year, then we would take this year's grade 3 enrollment and forecast that next year's grade 4 will be 2 students higher.
We use a different process for Kindergarten, Readiness, and Grade 1 since we do not have cohorts to work with in developing a forecast. For the past few years we have been tracking the birth rates in Milford as reported in the annual Town summary. In VERY rough numbers, we have been averaging 150 reported births per year in town, and six years later, have had about 200 students in first grade. We look at variations in the birth rate six years ago to forecast variations in upcoming enrollments.
Since students are not required to attend kindergarten, there will not be 100% enrollment even if we start to offer public kindergarten in Milford. There will be families that do not enroll their children in any kindergarten, and there will be some that enroll them in private kindergarten even if public is available. There may be religious reasons, or there may be convenience reasons for choosing a private kindergarten.
We have generally used the assumption that the public kindergarten enrollment figure will be 80% of the first grade enrollment to account for the no-shows. This is one of the figures that we are going to recheck during the next few months to validate the assumption. We are going to contact nearby school districts to see what they are experiencing.
One issue that needs to be considered is that it is possible that the state will mandate full-day kindergarten instead of the half-day program that was first proposed. It is possible that the average percentage enrollment will be different for a full-day program than for a half-day program.
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