Earlier this year the Brookings Institution and the Greater Ohio Policy Center garnered attention from both gubernatorial candidates for their suggestion in the Restoring Prosperity report that Ohio school districts consolidate. Merge, consolidate, down-size ? all scary-sounding words when budget woes blanket the state (and nation). But in light of the report's findings, consolidation came across as pragmatic rather than ominous. That's because Ohio spends 49 percent more on district administration than the national average, and ranks 47th in terms of the amount of spending that makes it into K-12 classrooms while ninth in terms of money spent on administration.
But can Ohio districts really thin out their central offices? Or is there a critical mass of administrative staff toward which most Ohio districts converge out of necessity? We examined pupil-administrator ratios and the amount spent on administrators as a percent of total expenditures in all Ohio districts for which the data was available. We also broke down the data to see if patterns emerge according to district size. Here's what we found.
Of all Ohio districts for which the data was available, the state average is 150.2 pupils per administrator, with the most top-heavy district (Bettsville Local) at 37.4 and the leanest, New Albany-Plain Local, at 308.6.
In Ohio, there is an enormous range in terms of administrative load and amount spent on such staff and most of that is correlated with districts' size. In light of this, districts ? especially the smallest ones ? must ask themselves tough questions about whether it's worth merging positions where there's potential duplication in order to discover cost savings.
Flypaper readers, are there similar ranges in terms of what districts in your state spend on administrators, and how many they employ? Is consolidation a dirty word or are education folks embracing it because of its savings potential?
**Note: Previous Ohio Gadfly analyses reveal that consolidation in just half of Ohio's districts (the smallest ones) could yield as much as $40 million in savings. While that's not chump change, it's important to point out ? as Emmy did earlier this week ? that the true savings potential comes from reductions in the number of teachers, whose salaries and benefits represent the greatest costs in K-12 education. Even increasing class sizes by one or two students could yield hundreds of millions of dollars in savings across the state. Unfortunately, this cost-saving suggestion lies in one of the most politically unpalatable places. Putting forth policy ideas having anything to do with teachers losing their jobs is sort of like venturing to retrieve the baseball that was infamously held hostage by that Sandlot dog.
- Jamie Davies O'Leary
