by James A. Bacon
It now seems to be the received wisdom that high turn-out by African-Americans in the East End of Henrico County was the decisive factor that won approval for the 4% meals tax. African-Americans bore a slew of grievances regarding the under-performance of East End schools and racial disparities in the disciplining of students for school infractions. Proponents of the meals tax appealed to those grievances in a mailer that stated, “The side of the county they live on shouldn’t determine how much opportunity they are given.”
That statement played to the idea that kids in poor East End school districts are getting short-changed. There is a widespread stereotype that kids in the affluent West End of Henrico, where the vast majority of taxes are paid, attend schools that are newer, better equipped and better staffed.
I decided to check the numbers. I first endeavored to get a breakdown of Henrico County public school expenditures by school. Much to my amazement, that information is not available — even under a Freedom of Information Act request. “Henrico County does not budget by specific schools, but rather by cost centers,” responded Andy Jenks, director of communications and public relations.
I will leave to another blog post the incomprehensibility of the idea of holding individual schools accountable for student performance on Standards of Learning tests without tracking how much money those schools are spending. Whatever. Instead, I decided to compare the number of staff — teachers, administrators, counselors, etc. — to the number of students. Insofar as salaries are the biggest cost center for schools, the staff-student ratio is a decent proxy for total resources expended. Mr. Jenks was more than helpful in providing that information.
The first column of numbers in the table above displays the number of employees at each of Henrico County’s five school districts, broken down by elementary, middle and high schools, in 2013. (Central administration and countywide staff are excluded.) The second column shows enrollment for the 2013-2014 school year. From those two sets of numbers I derived a student-to-staff ratio for each school, shown in the third column. Then, as an indicator of the number of poor and disadvantaged kids at each school, I appended the percentage of students on free and reduced lunch programs in the fourth column. (To see the list broken down by individual schools, click here.)
The data show clearly that the Fairfield and Varina school districts on the East End of Henrico have lower student-to-staff ratios, which is another way of saying that they have a greater number of staff for a given number of students. For elementary and middle schools, there is a near-perfect correlation — the poorer the student population, the lower the number of students per staff. Indeed, Arthur Ashe Elementary, with a 6.1 student-to-staff ratio, the lowest in the county, is less than half that of Shady Grove Elementary, with a 12.6 ratio, the highest. In other words, there are twice as many staff and teachers for a given number of students at Arthur Ashe.
Admittedly, that’s an extreme case. But the evidence is crystal clear. The distribution of staff resources does not favor the affluent school districts; quite the contrary, it favors the poorer school districts.
Does that settle the issue? Probably not. For one thing, it doesn’t end the argument that the East End schools tend to be staffed with more junior teachers with less teaching experience, while West End schools tend to get the veterans, who, by virtue of their seniority, are better paid. Nor does the table counter a possible claim that West End kids attend the newer, shinier schools. (For what it’s worth, my son goes to Douglas Freeman High School in the Tuckahoe district, which is 59 years old.)
Perhaps most important, the table says nothing about how resources should be distributed. Given the higher prevalence of learning disabilities and poverty-related issues, one could argue that East End schools deserve an even bigger share of the resources. That would be a hard sell for West End parents who are paying most of the taxes, but it could be made. One issue that we can decisively settle, however, is the idea that privileged West End schools enjoy any resource advantage over poor East End schools. They don’t. End of story.
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