Lieutenant Governor Releases Statistics On Vocational Technical and Charter School Spending

Report is part of ongoing effort to direct public dollars into the classroom

For Immediate Release: Monday, May 17, 2010

Wilmington - Lieutenant Governor Matthew Denn has released the second half of his annual report on the percentage of funds spent by schools on the direct education of students. This annual report, which today focus on vocational technical schools and charter schools, is designed to encourage Delaware public schools to spend a greater portion of their public funds in the classroom rather than on administrative overhead costs.

The first half of Denn's report, released last month, indicated that Delaware's traditional public school districts could spend up to $28 million more in the classroom without raising taxes, if they were all directing funds into the classroom at the same rate as the districts with the best performance in this area.

The report and statistics released today indicate:

• Charter schools in Delaware generally spend a lower percentage of their total dollars on direct student expenditures than traditional public school districts. However, charter schools should be expected to have lower overall percentages of their funds devoted to direct student expenditures, because they must pay for facility costs out of their annual operating costs.

• Even given the differential described above, there is an extraordinary range among the charter schools with respect to the percentage of funds spent on direct student expenditures -- substantially greater than the spread among traditional public school districts. The traditional public school district with the highest percentage of funds spent on direct student expenditures spent 77.47% on those expenditures, while the district with the lowest spent 69.59%. By contrast, the charter school with the highest percentage spent on direct student expenditures spent 72.63%, while the school with the lowest percentage spent 50.83%.

• Although there is not a direct statistical correlation between a charter school''s population of low-income students and the amount it spends on expenditures that are not considered direct student expenditures, it is notable that among the six charter schools that spent the highest percentages of their funds on direct student expenditures, only one had a "low-income" student population of over 40%. Conversely, six of the seven charter schools that spent the lowest percentages of their funds on direct student expenditures had low-income populations over 40% of their student body--and five of those seven schools had low-income populations over 70% of their student body.Like charter schools, vocational technical school districts generally spent a lower percentage of their total dollars on direct student expenditures than traditional public school districts. It is difficult to draw conclusions from this variance, because of the different educational services provided by vocational-technical schools, some of which may entail higher facility and equipment costs than those incurred by traditional school districts.

"This process of tracking dollars going into the classroom is always important," Denn said, "but it is even more important in these times when both taxpayers and state government are strapped for funds. My hope is that parents and taxpayers will use these statistics to ask questions of those who run their schools, and encourage them to redouble their efforts to direct public dollars at kids in the classroom."

The Final Charter and Vo-Tech Spending Report can be viewed here.

The Charter and Vo-Tech Spending Charts can be viewed here.