LADY BUDGETDOWN: PLYMOUTH-CANTON COMMUNITY SCHOOLS
Well, well, well... the new NCES rabbit hole is already earning its keep. 🐇🪶
After a reader asked whether the broad "administrator" category could be broken apart, I went digging. The answer is yes, and Plymouth-Canton gives us a rather interesting example.
Over the last decade:
🏛� District / central-office administrative FTE
2014-15: 20.95
2024-25: 66.70
Change: +218.4%
🏫 School / building administrative FTE
2014-15: 54.25
2024-25: 55.00
Change: +1.4%
Read that again.
The administrative staffing reported at the school/building level remained virtually unchanged.
Meanwhile, the district-level administrative category went from 20.95 FTE to 66.70 FTE, more than tripling.
Now, before anyone starts sharpening a pitchfork, Lady Budgetdown is NOT declaring that 45.75 people were simply hired into some giant new central-office suite. These are NCES staffing classifications reported as full-time equivalents, and over a decade positions, responsibilities and reporting classifications can change.
Which is precisely why the numbers lead to a question rather than a conclusion:
🪶 What changed in Plymouth-Canton over those ten years that resulted in district-level administrative FTE increasing 218.4%, while school/building administration remained almost perfectly flat?
Maybe there is a perfectly reasonable explanation.
But when one category moves +218.4% while the other moves +1.4%, the ledger is certainly going to notice.
And now that I finally wrestled these NCES files into submission, this administrative breakdown is becoming a regular part of my district reviews.
Because sometimes the interesting part isn't whether a number went up.
It's where it went up. 👑
Source: National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Common Core of Data, District Staff Files — 2014-15 & 2024-25.