Tales from the BudComm – “Do you see what I see?”

Yes, I am deliberately being shameless in “culturally appropriating” a line from a well beloved Christmas carol – deal with it because FREEDOM!  That’s what Americans do – take from other cultures (after all, there’s plenty to “borrow” from) and repurpose it to make our culture better.  But here, the question fits as now the massive flurry of subcommittee meetings and report writing has calmed down and one can actually start to sit down and meditate, cogitate, and try to do something more than a surface cursory level analysis.  Like “how come it costs so much?”

Well, one answer that I discovered about my hamlet that it cost so much on the municipal side is that after comparing my town to the other 32 towns in NH with similar populations, we pay an awful lot.  In fact, across pretty much against all job titles/descriptions, we paid our people generally so well they came in first, second, third, fourth, or fifth overall (and generally the first three).  But now starting to do the same on the School District side, with just a “next level down from cursory analysis”, I found another way to do inflate costs (I’m fairly sure).  Here, take a gander at this:

Here’s a quick chart – do you see what I see?

NH BoE stands for the State of NH Board of Education. Max is the maximum allowable; Preferred is what they want class sizes to be (labs can be a max of 24 students).

More data is needed and I have to do it across the board but the two general questions are driving this: what is the student/teacher ratio and what is the District’s Direct/Indirect Labor ratio (yes, I’ve had to explain that last one several times as I guess it is not a question that the Educational community asks itself).  I’ll let you know more later on.

Standards, man, standards…