📜 DEAREST READERS, LET US TURN THE PAGE TO STAFFING.
Our first look at Croswell-Lexington Community Schools showed something significant: over the last decade, enrollment declined considerably.
So naturally, Lady Budgetdown had another question.
**Did staffing decline with it?** 🪶
The answer is **yes - but not at the same rate overall.**
From **2014-15 to 2024-25:**
👩�🎓 **STUDENT COUNT**
2,250 → 1,708
**Down 542 students - 24.1%**
Now to the employees.
🏛� **TOTAL EMPLOYEE HEADCOUNT**
417 → 369
**Down 48 employees - 11.5%**
Breaking that down:
**Administrators:** 17 → 17
**No change - 0.0%**
**Teachers:** 130 → 107
**Down 23 - 17.7%**
**Day-to-Day Substitute Teachers:** 57 → 43
**Down 14 - 24.6%**
**Paraprofessionals/Aides:** 39 → 48
**Up 9 - 23.1%**
**Day-to-Day Substitute Paras/Aides:** 27 → 24
**Down 3 - 11.1%**
**Non-Instructional Staff:** 147 → 130
**Down 17 - 11.6%**
But headcount only tells us how many individual people appear in the data. **FTE tells us the actual staffing capacity**, so Lady Budgetdown checked that ledger too.
📊 **TOTAL STAFFING FTE**
280.53 → 250.20
**Down 30.33 FTE - 10.8%**
Within that:
🏛� **Administrators:** 17.00 → 16.95
**Down 0.05 FTE - 0.3%**
🍎 **Teachers:** 129.50 → 105.50
**Down 24.00 FTE - 18.5%**
👥 **Paraprofessionals/Aides:** 37.35 → 46.48
**Up 9.13 FTE - 24.4%**
💼 **Non-Instructional Staff:** 96.68 → 81.27
**Down 15.41 FTE - 15.9%**
And here is where context matters.
Croswell-Lexington **did reduce staffing as enrollment declined.** That deserves to be stated plainly.
But the reductions did not occur proportionately across every category.
Student count declined **24.1%**, while total staffing FTE declined **10.8%**. Teacher FTE declined **18.5%**, non-instructional FTE declined **15.9%**, administration remained essentially flat, and paraprofessional/aide FTE actually **increased 24.4%**.
Does that automatically mean something is wrong?
**No.**
Paraprofessional staffing, for example, can be affected by student needs, special education services, programming and other factors that a simple staffing table cannot explain.
But it does give us something valuable:
**A question worth asking.**
Why has Croswell-Lexington's staffing mix changed this way while the district serves 542 fewer students than it did a decade ago?
Perhaps there is a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Lady Budgetdown rather enjoys finding those, too. 🪶
**The numbers do not tell us what to think. They tell us what questions to ask.**
🪶 With receipts and respect,
**Lady Budgetdown**
Croswell-Lexington Community Schools
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