School Budget should be closer to $500M, not $600M

So should our school budget be closer to $500M instead of last year's $623M? 

The Taxpayer has some evidence to suggest that by looking at some tables in the back of this year's annual budget.

We indexed the number of students, teachers, schools, total budget, student teacher ratio, and cost per pupil back to the year 2000 (so for 2000 everything equaled 1.0 as a baseline). 

Remember how nice it was in 2000? Only the fear of Y2k and everything was still peaceful in the world.  The Taxpayer would argue we had a pretty good school system back then too. 

Well what happened??  Students grew by 15%. The number of schools grew by 12%. The number of teachers grew by 23% causing the student teacher ratio to shrink by 7%.  The Chesterfield County Public School budget??  Well take a look for yourself:

For those that don't like silly graphs.  The budget grew by 81% and the cost per pupil grew by 57%.  Adjusting for annual inflation over time, we see that the dollar has 29% less buying power than in 2000. 

The bottomline calculation is that if we just kept pace with inflation and student growth, The Taxpayer would have seen a stable, sustainable budget of about $500M for FY2009 and no belt tightening required.  Instead the discussion is "oh it hurts to get to $575M!!".  We had about $123,000,000 worth of bloat in 2009 alone.  I bet if our school system were funded today at $500M, we would be in a stronger position with our commerical and residential development AND the results of key student performance indicators would have been similar. Instead, we have wasted a decade.

The Taxpayer encourages you to speak out at the upcoming Board of Supervisor meeting at 6PM on Wednesday March 24th.  Many will arrive with their hand out.  Tell them to keep walking and that we need to tighten our local government's finances.

The Taxpayer Thought of the Day:  What would happen if Chesterfield County twittered every expenditure online for the public to see. Just saying...