The short answer is, “I don’t know.”

The longer answer is to look at the list of non-teacher employees that I found for one my local K-5 schools a few years back:

   *) 1 librarian
   *) 1 school nurse
   *) 1 principal
   *) 0 assistant principals
   *) 1 secretary
   *) 1 school psychologist
   *) 1 “special resources” person
   *) 1 “speech” person
   *) 1 “technology” person
   *) 1 literacy/reading recovery
   *) 1 food services person
   *) 2 ELD people
   *) 1 custodian
   *) 1 community liason
   *) 1 “C.H.A.C” person
   *) 1 “CELDT” person
   *) 1 catagorical clerk

I don’t know what all of these are (CELDT?), so I can’t be too sure what would happen if these people were missing. Additionally, there are some district people (about 2 per school, for my district, I think) and people that I know we have (e.g. bus drivers) that I don’t know where/if they are accounted for.

So …

I’m pretty sure that each school needs a principal, secretary, and janitor. I’d be very reluctant to lose the librarian.

After this, I suspect it starts mattering what you value. I don’t think we had a school psychologist at my elementary school when I was going to school (30ish years ago). Does each school need a nurse? Beats me. How about the literacy/reading-recovery specialist?

-Mark Roulo

How much discretion is there in spending on the non-teaching staff vs teaching staff? Most of the time I hear about “cutting education funding means laying off teachers” but nothing about support staff.

This number is plausible.

I’ll use California as an example and numbers from a few years ago …

Around 2007, California spent about $10K per child for K-12 public education (this is per enrolled child, so kids going to private schools aren’t part of this).

About $7K of that shows up at the school districts and $3K stays at the state level. Some of this goes to pay for school bonds that were borrowed earlier. Some goes to pay for state department of education employees. And some goes elsewhere … I don’t know the breakdowns.

At my local district, around 80-90% of the money that the district gets goes to personnel. The rest goes for things like electricity, supplies, gasoline for the school buses.

This leaves about $6,500 per student for salaries and benefits.

About 1/2 the district is teachers an the other half are people doing other things: principal, secretary, janitor, librarian, school nurses, etc.

So … about $3,250 per student flows to the teachers. Some chunk of this is benefits (health care, pension, etc). Maybe $2,500 shows up as paychecks for classroom teachers.

This is 25%.

A check is that the state was spending about $10K per student, the classrooms averaged about 25 kids (20 for the younger grades, 30 for the older kids), which works out to $250,000 per classroom. 25% of $250,000 is $62,500 and the average public school teacher salary in California a few years back was about $55,000 … so the numbers are roughly correct.

-Mark Roulo

This implies that teacher salaries are about 30/160 the total cost of running the district – less than 20%. Where does the other 80% go?