Dearest readers,
Sometimes Lady Budgetdown goes looking for a rabbit hole. And sometimes the rabbit hole rather impolitely introduces itself.
This afternoon, Lady Budgetdown was attempting to answer a much simpler question:
Which district should I examine next?
Nothing terribly dramatic.
I already have a statewide NCES staffing dataset comparing Michigan school districts between 2014–15 and 2024–25. So I decided to look at one particular category:
District/Central Administration.
More specifically, the NCES staffing category for LEA Administrators, administrators working at the district level rather than school/building administrators.
Then I asked a very simple question:
Which traditional public school districts added the greatest number of District/Central Administration FTE over those ten years?
Not the largest percentage increase. That distinction matters. A tiny district moving from one administrator to three could produce an enormous percentage while adding only two actual positions.
So Lady Budgetdown ranked them instead by the actual increase in administrative FTE.
And, dearest reader, the ledger produced this:
Michigan's Top Five Increases in District/Central Administration FTE
2014–15 → 2024–25
🥇 Plymouth-Canton Community Schools
20.95 → 66.70
+45.75 FTE (+218.4%)
🥈 Rochester Community School District
18.03 → 42.00
+23.97 FTE (+132.9%)
🥉 Chippewa Valley Schools
25.12 → 46.50
+21.38 FTE (+85.1%)
4. Lansing Public School District
19.95 → 41.01
+21.06 FTE (+105.6%)
5. Grand Rapids Public Schools
42.50 → 62.00
+19.50 FTE (+45.9%)
And here is where Lady Budgetdown nearly dropped the abacus. We have already examined four of them.
Plymouth-Canton.
Rochester.
Chippewa Valley.
And Grand Rapids, whose ledger we just finished examining.
I did not select those districts because they appeared on this list. I didn't know this list existed. I found it because I was looking for the next district.
That distinction is rather important.
The districts Lady Budgetdown has examined were generally selected because something in the public records, a reader tip, or another breadcrumb suggested there might be something worth examining.
Only afterward did I discover that four of those districts also appear among the five largest raw increases in District/Central Administration FTE in this statewide comparison.
That does not prove wrongdoing.
It does not prove that any particular administrative position was unnecessary.
And it certainly does not tell us why those administrative structures changed.
It tells us where to look.
Which, as regular readers know, is precisely what numbers are supposed to do.
The number tells us where to look.
The receipts tell us what happened.
And sitting quietly at number four is one district Lady Budgetdown has not yet examined:
Lansing Public School District.
Well.
It appears the ledger has selected our next rabbit hole for us.
Fetch the spectacles.
📚 Source: National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data — district staffing data, 2014–15 and 2024–25. District/Central Administration reflects the NCES LEA Administrator category. Traditional public school districts were compared; ISDs/RESAs and public school academies were excluded. NCES_Michigan_Staffing_Master_2014-15_vs_2024-25.xlsx
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