NJDOE Releases 2015 Taxpayer Guide to Ed Spending
The New Jersey Department of Education released the 2015 Taxpayers' Guide to Education Spending April 1. The report is meant to serve as an easy guide for citizens on how their tax dollars are spent related to education funding in their local district.
Included within the guide are two types of total expenditures:
- Total per-pupil spending, which details all district expenditures including state expenditures on behalf of school districts; and
- Budgetary costs per pupil, which only includes costs that are similar among school districts.
For the 2013-14 school year, the average total cost per pupil in the state is $19,211. This is 1.6 percent higher than the prior year's average of $18,909.
The guide also compares school districts of similar size and ranks districts in 14 spending categories, such as total administrative costs and total classroom instruction, as well as four staffing indicators such as student-teacher ratios and ratios of faculty to administrative staff. Costs are ranked on a per-pupil basis from low to high.
The guide was first produced in the spring of 1997 as the Comparative Spending Guide. The guide's name was changed in 2011, when the Department of Education developed a new spending measure.
Source NJDOE