STCS - 10-YEAR ENROLLMENT & STAFFING

[Shadowninja]

Dearest reader,

The Saginaw Township ledger is getting another page. In Step One, I laid out eleven years of financial receipts.

Now comes Step Two:

What happened to staffing while enrollment was changing?

For this one, Lady B went directly to Michigan's Registry of Educational Personnel data and pulled every December staffing file from 2014-15 through 2024-25. These are the personnel records districts report to the state, expressed here as full-time-equivalent positions, or FTE.

And this is precisely why I wanted to try a deeper methodology.

Over the period, Saginaw Township enrollment declined 6.7%.

Teacher FTE?

It did not decline with enrollment.

It increased slightly, from 212.15 to 215.99.

The number of pupils per reported teacher FTE therefore fell from about 22.9 to 21.0.

That is not a measure of classroom size, and Lady B isn't going to pretend that it is. But it does tell us that, relative to enrollment, reported teacher staffing increased.

Now, administration.

This is where labels matter.

The district reported 6.0 LEA administrator FTE at the beginning of the ledger and 7.0 at the end.

School administrator FTE increased from 18.17 to 20.08.

So despite what someone might assume from the financial growth in the broad "Business & Administration" category we saw in Step One, the staffing receipts do not show some enormous expansion of actual administrator FTE.

That distinction matters.

Administrative support is another story, but also one requiring caution.

Those categories jump sharply beginning in 2020-21. Other support classifications show a similarly abrupt break at almost exactly the same point.

Could that represent actual staffing changes? Possibly.

Could reporting, classification, or assignment changes be involved? Also possibly.

And until I can distinguish between the two, Lady B is not turning a dramatic percentage into a dramatic headline.

Receipts aren't very useful if we only keep the convenient ones.

So what does Step Two actually tell us?

Fewer students.

Slightly more teacher FTE.

A modest increase in administrator FTE.

More teachers relative to the number of students.

And a substantial change in reported support staffing that deserves an asterisk until I understand what happened to those classifications.

That's it.

No scandal manufactured.

No inconvenient number buried.

Just another layer of context added to the ledger.

Which, after all, was the entire point of going deeper.

Next page soon.

With receipts and respect,

Lady Budgetdown

#LadyBudgetdown #WithReceiptsAndRespect #TheLedger #FiscalTransparency #SchoolFinance #SaginawTownship #MichiganSchools #PublicEducation #FollowTheNumbers #SchoolStaffing

Sources:
Michigan Center for Educational Performance and Information (CEPI) — Registry of Educational Personnel (REP). Districts report employment and assignment information through REP, which is used for state and federal personnel reporting.
MI School Data / CEPI — Additional Staffing Data Files, December REP Full-Time Equivalency files, 2014-15 through 2024-25. The annual files provide staff FTE at the district level by staffing group.
MI School Data — Staffing Count methodology and definitions. FTE represents the portion of a full-time position reported within a staffing group; individuals serving in multiple staffing groups can appear in more than one group.