PLYMOUTH-CANTON COMMUNITY SCHOOLS: WHERE DID THE ADMINISTRATION GO?

[Shadowninja]

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.