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MATCH School Thoughts on U.S. DOE Report |
We were pleased to be included in the US DOE report. However, we wanted to provide context for two statistics mentioned in their report.
1. US DOE describes our annual per-student spending as $16,000.
a. According to its budget, the Boston Public School district spends $849 million -- $713 million (page 9) plus $136 million (page 66). The district has 57,900 students. That's $14,000 per student.
b. This does not include BPS capital costs. For example, the district gets money from the City Of Boston -- over $100 million is mentioned in the FY2007 budget -- for capital improvements to schools. Our school is not permitted to share in those revenues.
c. Our annual cost per student, minus our capital costs -- annual mortgage payments on our building -- is about $14,000.
Therefore, we spend about the same amount per student as the district.
2. US DOE describes our "graduation rate" as 100%.
The MA Department of Education defines a dropout as someone who leaves school entirely -- they stop going to school.
While our dropout rate is 0%, we have many students who TRANSFER back to district schools. We want to be clear that while we are following the MA DOE definition of dropouts in our annual reports, we do have ATTRITION. We describe that in some depth on our website here.
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