KPLU Local News
(2009-11-02)
Listen Now:
SEATTLE, WA
(KPLU) -
After recovering from a 34-million dollar budget deficit, the Seattle School District says it's heading into the next budget at least 16-million in the red. Now, a new report from a mom with two kids in the district is raising some serious questions about how the district is spending its money.
null
The Seattle School District has seen a steady decline in students over the years, so you would think that spending on Central administration, the people who oversee everything, would be scaled back. No, not according to a new report put together by Meg Diaz.
Diaz says Supervision of Instruction has ballooned the most. "Five years ago it was 14-million dollars a year and this year it's 31-million dollars, which is as much as we spend one very principal's office in the district"
Diaz worked for several years building financial models for a strategy consulting firm in Seattle. It took her six weeks of sifting through reams of data from the Seattle School District and the state to put together the 13-page report.
The other big finding Diaz says she made is that the budget the district presents to the school board is much different from the one that's filed with the State Office of Public Instruction. "When this year's budget came out it seemed deeply improbable that our Central Administration was only 2.8 percent of the Operating Budget. It's almost half of what other districts are operating at. And we had so recently said to the state auditor who had criticized us for being top heavy with administrators and that we (Seattle SD) said that we're more complex and we need more, that there seemed to be some dissonance."
After crunching some more numbers, Diaz says the budget the state receives from Seattle includes about 30-million more dollars for Central Administration.
David Tucker, a spokesman for the district, says this issue now has the school board's full attention."The Board takes all different inquiries and community concerns seriously, and so they considered it a very thoughtful report and they want the district to review it and provide its feedback and analysis on the report."
The district's Chief Financial Officer, Don Kennedy, will go over what he thinks of the report's findings at a meeting with the school board later this week. Figuring out the financial truth is not the only task at hand. The district also needs to preserve the trust of parents and voters. The Seattle School District hopes voters will pass a multimillion dollar levy next year that will pay for a large part of its operating budget.
JW, KPLU News Seattle. Central Administration Spending Report © Copyright 2012, KPLU
