According to the Virginia government $ 4,714,536,188 was spent on public K-12 education for the 2010/2011 school year. That is four billion with a "B".
According to the the 2011 US Census there are 1,574,060 people aged 5 to 19 in Virginia which I am using as a rough approximation of the total number of school aged children in the state.
That means the state of Virginia spends $2995.14 per student.
I took it a step further and looked at spending per pupil for the Williamsburg James City County School Division (WJCC) and the York County School Division (YCS). Those are two of the local divisions around where I live. Each local school division gets money from its local government for education. To calculate these numbers I took the total student enrollment for 2010 and the final budgeted amount for 2010. I got the information from both of the school division websites from various documents. WJCC spent $10382.92 per student and YCS spent $9826.28 per student.
The numbers from the local divisions include the money from the state of Virginia.
The spending by school divisions incorporates more than just instruction. It also includes transportation, administration, athletics, nursing, special education, facilities, and other supportive tasks.
I am obviously making some large generalizations by not drilling down into more specifics about the numbers; however, I do feel that this gives a good overview of the investment made by the local communities and the state on behalf of children and their education.
Sources:
http://dpb.virginia.gov/budget/buddoc11/agency.cfm?agency=197
http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk
http://www.wjcc.k12.va.us/
http://yorkcountyschools.org/
No comments:
Post a Comment