Although, in fairness, the budget could have been worse, it's still bad news for Kentucky education. One big reason; the huge and growing amount of money being eaten up by employee benefits vs. all other funding for education.
We asked our consultant Susan Weston to conduct a long-term review of those two funding areas, and this chart is the shocking result of her work.
As the graphic shows, inflation-adjusted spending on health insurance and retirement benefits for P-12 employees has grown by $620 million over the past 20 years. Spending for all other P-12 needs has grown by $22 million. That's 97 percent vs. 3 percent - making a clear case for the critical need to bring spending on benefits under control.
SOURCE: Prichard Committee Email
3 comments:
Richard,
I really am lost with this one.
According to KDE's Receipts and Expenditures Reports, which go all the way back to 1989-90, in that last pre-KERA year the total expenses for all the districts summed to $2,183,707,206.
In constant 2009 dollars, the 1989-90 figure would be $3,584,437,250, according to the CPI Inflation Calculator from the US Census Bureau web site.
In the 2008-09 term, total expenditures for all the districts rose to $5,552,951,782.
So, total real spending went up $1,968,514,532 in the districts between 1989-90 and 2008-09. That is a whole lot more real spending than Weston reports.
I have not seen the original Prichard e-mail, but the numbers Susan talks don't align at all with the numbers for the districts in the KDE report.
Can you provide more information?
Richard,
Sorry, but no. I've been too busy elsewhere to get into it.
This is one of those stories I noticed and reprinted without investigation of any kind. In fact the email went out on the 10th, as I recall, and I'm just now catching up on material of that vintage.
Susan's good about citing her sources and calculations. You might want to ask her.
R.
By the way, I heard today that the KEA fussed at Prichard for the report. They apparently didn't like what the data said.
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