MANCHESTER COMMUNITY SCHOOLS: 10-YEAR STAFFING COMPARISON

[Shadowninja]

MANCHESTER COMMUNITY SCHOOLS — STEP TWO

Well, dear readers...

Yesterday's ledger left me with a question. Manchester Community Schools lost nearly 40% of its students over ten years. At the same time, Business & Administration spending per pupil increased 104.39%, while average teacher salary actually declined.

So naturally, I opened the staffing ledger. 🪶

And this is precisely why I don't like deciding what the numbers are going to say before I read them. Because Step Two did NOT show administrative staffing growing while enrollment declined.

Quite the opposite.

From 2014-15 to 2024-25:

🎓 STUDENTS
1,121 → 680.27
DOWN 39.32%

🍎 TEACHER FTE
48.50 → 39.92
DOWN 17.69%

🏛� SCHOOL ADMINISTRATOR FTE
4.00 → 1.42
DOWN 64.50%

📋 SCHOOL ADMINISTRATIVE SUPPORT FTE
10.05 → 5.60
DOWN 44.28%

And at the central office?

LEA Administrator FTE remained essentially flat:

1.01 → 1.00

LEA Administrative Support FTE:

1.00 → 1.00

No increase at all.

That matters.

Because yesterday's Step One showed Business & Administration spending per pupil increasing from $1,276 to $2,608.
UP 104.39%.

And when I checked the underlying totals, total Business & Administration spending had still increased approximately 24% despite the district serving roughly 441 fewer students.

But today's staffing receipts tell me something important:

MORE ADMINISTRATORS DOES NOT APPEAR TO BE THE EXPLANATION.

In fact, Manchester reduced school administrator FTE considerably faster than enrollment declined. So now Lady Budgetdown has a different question.

If administrative staffing was substantially reduced, why did total Business & Administration spending still increase approximately 24%?

Compensation?

Benefits?

Purchased or contracted services?

Changes in how expenditures were classified?

Something else entirely?

I don't know yet.

And "I don't know yet" is a perfectly respectable entry in the ledger.

There is another number worth noticing.

Enrollment declined 39.32%, while Teacher FTE declined only 17.69%.

Put another way, Manchester retained considerably more teaching capacity relative to the number of students it serves than it had ten years earlier.

Yet the average teacher salary went from:

$61,636 → $58,983.

DOWN 4.30% in actual dollars.

So Step Two didn't answer yesterday's question.

It sharpened it.

And that is exactly why I run the same methodology regardless of what I expect to find.

Sometimes the next receipt confirms the first suspicion.

Sometimes it sends the ledger somewhere completely different.

I follow whichever direction the numbers point. 🪶

Source: MI School Data / CEPI Registry of Educational Personnel (REP), December 2014 and December 2024.

The source document is the receipt.

With receipts and respect. 🪶

#LadyBudgetdown #ManchesterCommunitySchools #FollowTheMoney #SchoolFinance #FiscalAccountability #PublicRecords #WithReceiptsAndRespect