On the ballot this election day in southern Nevada, is a measure by the Clark County School District, which is 5th largest in the nation, to hike property taxes to pay for a $669 Million bond that purports to save crumbling schools and save students from a balmy 100+ °C Summer day.
Of course, the School District claims to be pinching pennies, even though they are willing to toss perfectly good furniture in order to have the snazziest new stuff.
Sadly, this is just an example of the school district spending more and more. In the last 50 years, the district has increased spending by 300%, adjusted for inflation, over the past 50 years, yet over a third of students fail to graduate!
How bad is it? The per pupil spending that is usually touted to demonstrate that the Clark County School District needs more money usually only included their General Fund; the thing is, that is only one of many funds. The Clark County School District has combined total expenditures from all fund for the 2012-2013 school year of $3,190,325,000.
This is a bit misleading, though, since Government Accounting methods (the same types that brought us the $600 hammer) does not account for interfund transfers or interfund balances. If we look at only the expenses themselves across the funds, things become a bit more clear. The total operating expenses from the General Fund are a bit over two billion dollars. The debt services fund spends $782,615,000, and the non-operating expenses from the capital account are $123,679,000. This brings the total up to over $2.9 Billion dollars. The district’s total enrollment is 307,574, which would bring the perpupil spending to $9522.
Still, this is assuming that the General fund is inclusive of all the spending for the Special Funds, and the operating expenses related to the Capital Projects Funds. The Special Revenue Funds are supposed to be separate, with separate funding sources. Of note, the Federal Projects Fund is funded from specific Federal grants of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, while the General Fund only lists about $300,000 from Federal coffers. If the General Fund pays for the salaries of the other funds, that amount reported as an expenditure should decrease whenever a different fund reimburses them via an expenditure of their own. Including the $386,850,000 (less $24.2M in interfund transfers out) of the Special Revenue Funds, brings the total to $3,291,299,000, or about $10,700 spend per pupil per year. This number still assumes that operating expenses for the Capital Funds and the Proprietary Funds are 100% being included in the General Fund spending!
Yet, this is not enough for the Clark County School District! Even though they are spending more than the average private school, they are failing miserably to educate the children of southern Nevada, with the brunt of their incompetence being dealt upon poor non-white schools that the left claims to protect.
A little mood music:
With nearly a quarter of a million dollars being spent on a classroom of about 23 or so students, we must ask ourselves: Is the taxpayers money being wisely spent?
