Recently I was preparing some charts to go over at the beginning of this year’s Amherst School District Ways and Means budget meetings.  I’ve gone through our budgets quite extensively trying to understand what our costs are and how we can control them.  One thing I look at is per-student spending, which we’ve gone over before.  What I really wanted to understand is how we compare with some of our neighboring towns.

Luckily, the state Department of Education puts their numbers online.  The state does the calculation somewhat different than you might expect as they remove certain budget areas like transportation and food service from the calculation.  With that in mind, these are the state’s cost per student numbers for elementary school education in Amherst, Bedford, Merrimack, and the state average as reported by the NH DOE from 2001-2012.

Per Student Costs for Elementary Education by Fiscal Year For Amherst, Bedford, Merrimack, and the State Averages.

So according to the state, in FY 2012 we outspent the state average by $4533/student, Bedford by $6378/student, and Merrimack by $4745 in elementary school education.  Go back and read that again.  I found this to be remarkable.  And a little surprising.  We need to understand why Amherst’s numbers are so very different from our neighboring towns.  Those other New Hampshire towns have the same health insurance and NH Teachers Retirement fund constraints that we do, so those probably aren’t the drivers.

For the record, here are the middle school numbers.  We’re high there too.

Per Student Costs for Middle School by Fiscal Year For Amherst, Bedford, Merrimack, and the State Averages, by Fiscal Year.

The table below has these cost/student numbers for just FY2012, and includes the numbers for the total district.  Keep in mind that Bedford and Merrimack don’t have multiple districts in their towns like we do, so their district numbers include high school (for the record, our Souhegan HS district comes in at $18,456.28/student in FY2012 according to the state).

I was pleasantly surprised to find that both Bedford and Merrimack school districts have their FY14 school budgets available online.  I have not yet done a thorough analysis to see how they compare with things we’ve already looked at, like health insurance.  But to try to understand how they spend so much less per student than we do, I took a quick look at their education spending and found something remarkable.  Amherst School District’s budget is heavily weighted in Special Education.  Considerably more than neighboring towns.  Here are the numbers, including the percentage of the budget spent on Special Education.

Now these are telling numbers.  In Amherst we are spending between 4 and 5 percentage points more of our budget on Special Education than our neighboring towns. This is a lot of money.  Why these numbers are so different needs to be understood.

Now what would our budget and cost/student look like if we had the the Special Education budget percentages of Merrimack or Bedford this upcoming school year?  I ran the numbers using Merrimack’s spending:

That is to say, if our special education spending was in line with neighboring towns, we would shave about $1.5 million off of our bottom line budget and reducing our spending/student by around $1200.  What I take from this is that we are extravagant in several areas in Amherst School District, Special Education being only one of them.