PAUSD spends $35K per student, among the highest in the bay area. However, we still can’t balance our budget, and always talk about cutting teachers.
Where is the money going? Check out the PAUSD Budget Explorer.
PAUSD has a $354 million budget for about 10,200 students, roughly $35K per student (up from about $16K a decade ago). The national average is about $18,000. Los Altos spends about $28K per student, San Jose is around $18K.
Where does it go? About 80% goes to salaries and benefits for teachers, aides and administrators. When your budget is nearly all people, the only way to save money is to reduce headcount. The teachers’ union requested a 13% salary increase, which the district calculates as 28% when you factor in total compensation.
Meanwhile, enrollment dropped from 12,527 in 2014 to 10,209 today. PAUSD is a “basic aid” district — funded by property taxes, not state aid. Revenue keeps going up with our property taxes, but students keep going down. Even staff (FTE) has gone up from 1,300 to 1,384.
Recently, when the superintendent Don Austin tried to cut 18 positions, the students, teachers and board rejected it - and he had to depart.
However, the root of this is basic math - not multivariable calculus (though Don Austin didn’t like that either), but budget math. And numbers don’t lie:
- We are spending more per student than any other district in the Bay Area.
- Staff FTE has increased 6% over the last decade.
- 80% of the budget is salaries/benefits — meaning “cuts” always mean cutting people.
But when we look at this holistically, Palo Alto taxpayers are funding a bit more than this:
- We are “basic aid” (self-funded) and get negligible state/federal aid.
- We pay $272.4M on property taxes, $16.0M on parcel taxes, and a cool $52.5M on new school buildings (like from the Measure Z bond)
We have to figure out how to run a school district effectively, while not burdening people with taxes.
- Do we still need the parcel tax? Per-student funding has more than doubled in a decade. The parcel tax currently generates about $16.5 million a year — originally meant to keep PAUSD competitive. At $35,000 per student, is it still necessary?
- Why does construction keep winning over classrooms? Every dollar in concrete is a dollar not in teaching. I’d rather have well-paid teachers in older buildings than shiny buildings with fewer teachers.
