Reply #54: No. [View All]

[donco6]

First, you're getting revenue and expenditures mixed up.

The district may SPEND $7,000 per child, but that doesn't necessarily match the state funding formula revenue. This amount is often increased by the amount of federal grant monies, fees, override levies through voter-approval, etc. You need to find out the revenue per pupil awarded by the state's finance act.

At any rate, I've never seen a bill that had a differential that large ($7,000 to $2,500). Our proposed bill only has a differential of 5%. In our case, that's about $287 that the district would be allowed to keep.

And no, class size would not decrease at all. Schools are staffed based on their pupil count, according to the staffing ratio the school board sets. In our case, it's 20:1. Say you have a school of 600. 60 kids decide to take advantage of the voucher. Originally, the staffing would have been 600/20 = 30. The new staffing is 540/20 = 27. No reduction in class size at all. And for the loss of 60 kids, you've lost 60 X $6,000 in revenue ($360,000), less the 5% you can keep, which offsets the loss by $17,220, for a net loss of $342,780.