I am indebted to FC1989 for providing me a link to a matrix of school system expenditures broken down by functional areas.
LINK

Number crunching nirvana! I have used that site to create a web query in Excel 2007 to do some serious analysis of FCBOE expenditures.

First of all, it was necessary to do an apples-to-apples comparisons. There are 165 school districts in Georgia, mostly counties, but a few city districts and a handful of special "charter districts".

The reason apples-to-apples is so critical is to prevent distortion: for example, Berrien County has 3000 students and pays their superintendent $100,000 per year. Comparing that to our own Dr. DeCotis would make it appear that we vastly underpay him to manage 22,000 students at 200K per year. I doubt many people in Fayette county (not named Smola, anyway) would agree that DeCotis merits an $800,000+ salary!

To get a peer group subset, I filtered school systems with student populations between 15,000 and 35,000 per year. Why these arbitrary numbers? Because above and below those numbers there are extremes that skew results, i.e. mega-school systems such as Dekalb, Gwinnett, and Clayton, and many dozen county school systems with 3 to 5 thousand students.

This gave me a "peer group" of fifteen schools:
Chatham County
Newton County
Douglas County
Paulding County
Coweta County
Rockdale County
Fayette County
Richmond County
Dougherty County
Houston County
Hall County
Forsyth County
Columbia County
Bibb County
Muscogee County

Next factor was QBE funding. QBE funding roughly equates to a level playing field, there should be little to no deviation from QBE standards with regard to funding UNLESS a school system pays for it themselves. Arguably, if a school system is 5% or more above or below state averages, there should be some explaination for the discrepancy.

I averaged the costs of functional areas within the peer group above then compared Fayette against their peer group as a percentage. Above 100% means we pay more on average than average, below 100% means we pay less.

• Classroom instruction: 108% (significantly above average)
• Pupil Services(Special Ed): 94%
• Staff Services: 96%
• General Administration: 101%
• School Administration: 111%

(significantly above average)

• Transportation: 95% (see below)
• Maintenance: 99%

TOTAL: 105% (3rd highest in peer group)

Some highlights:

1. From the DOE's perspective, Fayette is the wealthiest county in the state. Forsyth has higher average income, but has public housing that qualifies for Federal education assistance (Title I)
2. Fayette is the only county in the state which does not receive federal Title I funding....not enough poor people
3. Fayette has fewer Special Ed students as a percentage of the population OR the Special Ed students have a higher teacher/student ratio than other counties
4. From a funding standpoint, there appears to be no excessive amount of personnel at the County office
5. The individual schools, however, appear to be overstaffed in both professional and non-salaried positions. This bolsters sugarfoot's claim of "teaching consultants"
6. We're at the exact middle point for maintenance and operations staff
7. We're "below average" on transportation cost, but I believe that is misleading. The correct calculation should be Cost per Student divided by square miles in the county. There are HUGE deviations in transportation cost, more than any single category

Sooo...there you have it. Feel free to poke holes in my methodology, I had an hour to kill and did this primarily as a mental exercise.

Who can explain all this excess administrative cost at the school level? High asst. principal salaries? Too many clerks? I honestly don't know.