Monday, May 22, 2017

Making The Numbers Match

While writing my last post I felt compelled to back up some of my numbers by looking at the state budget.  Looking at the budget document online prompted me to look at K-12 spending in particular.  I admit that I'm flummoxed, what am I missing here?

Here's the State budget for 2017-18:
http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2017-18MR/#/BudgetSummary

Click on (and thus open the pdf's for) both Summary Charts and K-12 Education.

For summary charts, scroll down to Figure SUM-03, which shows a $183 billion state budget.  Note that the general fund portion of K-12 education is a little under $54 billion.  It also shows another $770 million in special and bond fund expenditures for a grand total of $54.3 billion.

Now open the K-12 pdf.  The 2nd paragraph on the 1st page says:
The May Revision includes total funding of $92.3 billion ($54.2 billion General Fund and $38.1 billion other funds) for all K‑12 education programs.
How, exactly, do you make the numbers on those two documents match?  Where is that $38 billion coming from?  Could it possibly come from the feds?  Wherever it comes from, it amounts to about a thousand dollars per person for everyone in California. That's a lot of money.
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7 comments:

  1. ObieJuan5:04 AM

    Mainly from property taxes (25%), you can find the other sources here:

    https://ed100.org/lessons/whopays


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  2. Auntie Ann10:02 AM

    Might also include local property taxes (do they route to the state, then back to the local area?) Here's a chart from AY2016 showing general fund = $49.7m, Feds = $7.4m, and local property taxes = $16.8m.

    http://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/eb/k12allfundsources15.asp

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  3. Darren10:34 AM

    Auntie Ann: property taxes and "other local funds" looks to account for about 2/3 of the difference. How do property taxes fund schools in California? I thought we got rid of that forever ago--unless you're talking about school bonds that are paid for by property taxes....

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  4. Darren10:36 AM

    ObieJuan's link is very clear, explains much. Those of you *not* in California might find it interesting how we fund schools here.

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  5. Anonymous12:43 PM

    I would have to look into it again, but I think if you look at either number and compare it to the entire state budget 10 or so years ago, you will find that todays spending on education is close to the same as the entire state budget back then.

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  6. Ellen K9:21 PM

    Texas is still here. Our department head left to run an elite program in the Prosper schools. If you get fed up, lots of your fellow Californians have made Texas home. Just saying.

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  7. Darren12:40 PM

    If we paid into social security, I'd consider it for sure. But since we pay into a state retirement system, I'd give up too much in retirement to move now. I'll just plug my nose and hold my breath for 11 more years.

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