First, I believe that taxpayer funding of the Academy is money well-spent and not at an inappropriate level. Let me stipulate that every dollar that goes to the Academy is well spent. Likewise, every dollar that goes to the pK-8 system is also well spent.
I believe that the Board of Trustees wants accurate information about the Academy disseminated to its constituency. But I found the ad published in the Shopper’s Guide on page 11 of the October 3rd issue inaccurate and misleading. In the lower half of this ad under “Economic Snapshot - Relative Cost Comparison” figures are given for spending per pupil and tuition rate for the Academy, Woodstock pK-8 school system, and 10 other eastern CT school systems. The message that the Academy wished to convey was that the Academy’s tuition rate was only $9425 for the 2005 year, the lowest of all 12 institutions listed. This ad is giving the costs for 2004-05 for comparison purposes. The tuition rate of $9425 is correct if one looks at the Academy budget for the “tuition rate,” but all of the other ‘tuition rates’ are wrong because they are inflated by debt service costs that are not found in education budgets of any town.
What is tuition anyway? Tuition is the cost for instruction and the administration that goes along with instruction. If you look at college costs, tuition is always separated from room & board because it pertains only to the cost of instruction. Bond debt service is not even a part of the education budget because the facilities are owned by the town not the school system, and bond debt service has nothing to do with instruction which teaches students. If a town built a school but had no instruction, no learning would occur, so the measure of instructional costs is a measure of the potential teaching and subsequent learning. If the Academy had not added debt service costs to the eleven towns listed in their ad, then per pupil spending in Brooklyn ($8933) and Woodstock pK-8 ($8360) would be well below total per pupil spending at the Academy ($9425 + SPED funding from the BOEs). Because debt service costs in each town have no direct bearing on spending levels for instruction, the state also separates out these costs. Read the rest of this entry »
