Manchester School District Spending

There are many discussions that take place about school spending and I’ve found it difficult to find data to put budget discussions into context. This post is the first in a series that will examine expenditures both citywide and in the school district.

This first, high-level look compares school district spending to student enrollments from 2011 through 2017. The following facts were revealed:

  1. School district expenditures have increased 10%
  2. Student enrollment has fallen 12%
  3. The cost-per-student has risen 20%
  4. Funding has increased each of the last 7 years

The budget expenditures were taken from the City of Manchester’s Budget Info website page. The current page only contains numbers from 2014, so I grabbed the previous years from archive.org. The enrollment numbers are taken from the NH Department of Education’s District Fall Enrollments, which include preschool, kindergarten, elementary, middle, junior high and high school enrollments reported by the district each year. The number for 2016-2017 is not reported yet, but I received a preliminary enrollment figure from the BOSC. I will update this post in early 2017 when the number is reported on the state website for the sake of consistency.

The numbers are presented in the following table:

[table “1” not found /]

Click on the image below to view it full-size. The infographic may be licensed via Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.

msd-spending-2011-2017