DCPS Budgets, the Good and the Bad

FY25 Version

Years ago, I became a public education advocate in DC after DCPS unexpectedly cut 5 staff members from my child’s school’s budget for no particular reason. The school was one of the lowest performing schools (a “priority” school) at the time. I figured that if DCPS was cutting staff from the most underserved schools - without a loss in enrollment - then it required investigation and getting to the bottom of the matter. Below is the first advocacy-related graph that I created by cross-referencing public school directories with publicly available information on DC employees to try to raise awareness on inequitable school spending. It showed that DC was spending way more on instruction in schools serving mostly affluent communities in DC than it was in underserved schools. DC was not spending EQUAL amounts of money, let alone EQUITABLE amounts.

What I later discovered was that, DCPS wasn’t allocating additional resources to underserved schools. In fact, despite public fanfare on this point, my child’s school received a total of $33,000 in supplemental funds (called “Excellence in Equity”), while serving >70% students whose families received food benefits and >20% students with special education needs. $33,000 was enough to fund 1/3 of a teacher. And, at the same time my child’s school was receiving an extra 1/3 of a teacher, other parent teacher organizations were raising thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, to supplement school budgets far beyond DCPS’s allocation.

I connected with other advocates (and better data) and created the graph below for 2017-18 showing the per-pupil expenditures for elementary schools in DC by the percentage of students designed as “at-risk”, which mostly aligns with receiving food benefits. As you can see, DCPS was not investing in underserved schools, particularly east of the river, yet DC leaders continually gave lip service to “equity” and “closing the achievement gap” and what have you. Again, the graph below doesn’t even show equal in some cases, much less equitable.

I wrote my dissertation on school budgeting within and between schools, and I purposefully removed special education funds when creating these graphs because a) special education is largely funded by federal dollars; b) the vast minority of students in every school receive special education services meaning that special ed services do not reach a majority of students; and c) underserved schools often serve a disproportionate percentage of students with special needs. If you don’t remove the special ed funds, then you don’t get apples-to-apples comparisons across schools. Moreover, DCPS places self-contained classrooms in specific schools. These classrooms have very few students, so they are costly, and they can make a school’s budget look much larger than it is in reality. (DCPS has also consistently understaffed these classrooms, essentially making them an unfunded mandate, where schools need to allocate additional staff out of their budgets to make these classrooms whole.)

This brings us to DCPS school budgets in FY25. The good is that DCPS’s new budget model allocates additional funds to underserved schools, even when accounting for special education and English learners (who pose the same comparison problem as special education students). You can see from the graph below of per-pupil expenditures in elementary schools for FY25, that schools serving underserved student populations generally received additional funds. This may be conflated with lower enrollments (and therefore smaller class sizes) in underserved schools, but it’s moving in the right direction. The schools serving PK only have very high per-pupil expenditures, and this is to be expected because PK costs more than other grades in DCPS due to different staffing models.

Similarly, we see similar patterns for middle schools and education campuses (K-8), where underserved schools receive additional resources, and schools with larger enrollments have lower per-pupil costs given the economies of scale.

High schools follow the same pattern, with underserved schools receiving additional resources and larger schools with lower per-pupil costs. However, a couple of schools with special programming stand out.

Is the additional investment in underserved schools enough to eliminate the effects of severe income inequality and close the achievement gap? No. Moreover, the dollars allocated to schools based on their % of “at-risk” students are supposed to be supplemental by law, above and beyond the base programming. We’re not there yet, but this is a huge improvement for DC.

The bad is that is that each year, the increase in staff costs is higher than the increase in school budgets, which results in staff cuts and raises questions about the adequacy of the funds. A preliminary glance shows that staff costs rose between 16-18% (but varies by the specific positions in each school), while DCPS increased the per-pupil amount by only 11%. This means staff cuts at the majority of schools, which violates the Council’s recent Schools First legislation.

Why do staff costs increase faster than budget allocations? First, the budget allocations are a choice, so there’s that. Second, the staff costs increase as a function of increased experience of teachers and salary increases negotiated by the union. But third, DCPS includes in staff costs that it pushes to schools things that are centrally managed, like fingerprinting and substitutes. So, to the extent that DCPS is artificially increasing the staff costs to make it seem like more money is going to schools than is actually the case, DCPS central is pushing its own rising costs to schools.

Mary Levy, DC’s #1 school budgeting expert, is working on analyses about loss of purchasing power for schools, relative to last year, as well as whether schools are receiving adequate funds to fund the bare minimum as defined by DCPS’s former comprehensive staffing model. There will be more to say about DCPS budgets. But I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that DCPS’s new budget model, however imperfect and likely inadequate, is an improvement in equity. For far too long, DC education leaders were not focused on equity, to the detriment of far too many students.

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Data notes:

• DCPS allocates social workers and psychologists based on hours in special education students’ individual education plans (IEPs). A study found that these allocations are not sufficient to meet the IEP hours for all special education students, much less provide services to general education students in the school. Therefore, they were also removed as part of the special education allocations.

• Similarly, board certified behavior analysts and behavior technicians for self-contained classrooms were removed as part of the special education allocations.

• Other special education and English learner allocations are more straightforward to identify in the DCPS budget data.