On November 17, 2006, the Houston Chronicle carried a story on how HISD's enrollment had a preliminary enrollment for the 2006-2007 school year of 203,163 students. This represented a 3 percent drop in enrollment from the 2005 year when the district absorbed Hurricane Katrina students from Louisiana, but still 2.5 percent lower than it was two years ago before the hurricane struck. That represented a 7,000 student drop in enrollment from last year and 5,000 students from two years ago. The story goes on to mention, with real truth, that a combination of charter schools (enrollment at 32,000 students) and cheaper housing in the surburban areas are reasons for drops in enrollment. The story even goes on to mention that the Cy Fair school district has grown to 92,000+ students, up 16 percent from a mere two years ago, making it the third largest public school district in Texas.
Now then, one of the topics that gets bandied about in the great public school district cosmic war is whether school class sizes are too large and that gosh darn it! we have to hire more teachers! Well, there are a number of websites which I visited to find out what student to teacher ratios were. I did find this,this and this. Though you can get very nitpicky about the subject, it seems that a good round number to work with is that student teacher ratios are in the 15:1 range.
So, if HISD dropped 7,000 students from last year and we have a student to teacher ratio of 15:1, then it would seem logically that HISD would need about 467 fewer teachers on the payroll (7,000 / 15). If your average teacher wage is about $40,000 per year in Texas and you add on - say - 25 percent to that figure in non wage benefits like health insurance, pension pay, etc, then you have a figure of about $50,000 per teacher in total compensation. It would then seem that the school district should be able to slim its teacher payroll down 467 teachers * $50,000 per teacher, which amounts to $23,350,000. I know that this is only about 1.6 or so percent of the 2006 HISD budget of $1.4 billion, but it should be enough to be able to cut the property tax paid by each and every homeowner in HISD's area by probably $50 next year. Either that, or the school district should be able to lower its property tax rate from its current rate of $1.62 per $100 of property tax value by a few pennies.
Either way, since there are fewer students enrolled in HISD's schools, I think I deserve some money back.
Here is HISD's own website by the way.
Ciao for now - TMW
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at November 21, 2006 11:32 PM