Walled Lake - 10-YEAR Staffing and Enrollment at a Glance

[Shadowninja]

Dearest Readers,

Continuing my review of publicly available data from MI School Data, today's district is Walled Lake Consolidated Schools.

One of the questions I hear most often is:

"How has staffing changed over time?"

As with the previous districts I've shared, it's important to understand that there are two different ways staffing is commonly reported.

📌 Headcount counts individual employees.

📌 FTE (Full-Time Equivalent) measures staffing capacity.

Those two measurements are related, but they are not the same.

For Walled Lake, the data show:

📚 Student enrollment declined from 14,807 to 11,861 students, a decrease of 2,946 students (-19.9%) over the past decade.

Looking at staffing over that same period:

👩�🏫 Teacher headcount decreased by 29 employees.

📖 Teacher FTE decreased by 35.29 full-time equivalent positions.

🏛� Administrator headcount decreased from 67 to 52.

🏛� Administrator FTE also declined, from 63.51 to 52.00.

At the same time, other staffing categories changed in different ways. For example, paraprofessional FTE increased, and non-instructional staffing increased substantially.

That's why I believe it's important to look beyond a single number.

When discussing school staffing, I think three questions belong together:

📖 How many students are being served?

👥 How many individual employees are working in the district?

⏱️ What is the district's full-time staffing capacity?

Looking at only one of those measures can tell an incomplete story.

As always, these posts are not endorsements or criticisms of any district. They are simply an effort to organize publicly available information into an easy-to-understand format so readers can ask informed questions and draw their own conclusions.

So I'll end with the same question I ask whenever I review a district:

What questions do these numbers raise for you?

With receipts and respect.