A Visualized History of Per-Pupil Expenditures Across Nebraska Public School Districts

NEED Series, Data Blog [4]

This post will examine how a school district’s total student enrollment relates to its per-pupil expenditures. I was able to wrangle and tabulate data from the 1999-2000 (AY 99-00) through 2021-2022 (AY 21-22) academic years. The origins of these data are the Nebraska Department of Education’s Statistics & Facts about Nebraska Schools and complementary archived data files of enrollment numbers.

Per-pupil spending is often derived using one of three methods to count students: average daily attendance (ADA), average daily membership (ADM), and seat counts. To enumerate ADA, the total days of student attendance is divided by the total days of instruction. Nebraska relies on ADM student counts to calculate per-pupil expenditures, which is found by taking the total number of students enrolled in a district divided by the total days of instruction over one school year. The use of ADM seems like a more stable (yet potentially less precise) estimate of the number of students within a school district per school day, as student daily attendance can be a tricky beast to wrangle.

Nebraska has varied in its U.S. state ranking for amount of per-pupil expenditures on its public school students. As of this post, Nebraska is sitting right in the “middle of the pack” at #22. The below plot (Figure 1) depicts the national average per-pupil spending by ADA because that is how the National Center for Education Statistics chose to count students. Since 2011, Nebraska has been spending more per-pupil, on average, than the average state in America. As exhibited in Figure 1, this divergence has grown since then.

Figure 1

Line Graph of Average Per-Pupil Expenditures by Year for Nebraska and the United States

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As expected, enrollment varies across Nebraska districts immensely. The smallest district within the shared data is the Montessori Schools of Omaha, who educated 6 students in 2001. The district with the greatest enrollment is Omaha Public Schools, who educated 53483 students in 2019. Overall, Nebraska school districts had an average enrollment of 1174 students. On the other hand, the minimum yearly per-pupil expenditure, $4330, originates from Schuyler Grade Schools in AY 99-00 while Litchfield Public Schools exhibits the greatest per-pupil expenditure in 2017 at $132302. The average money spent by districts, per-pupil, is $13159.

In Figure 2 below, the plot sequentially ascends in academic year from AY 99-00 through AY 21-22, where the observed “Year” on the plot indicates the year in which the academic year’s Fall semester begins. For example, “Year: 1999” is AY 1999-2000. You may notice data points which appear or disappear, illustrating the birth and death of school districts, which often arises from consolidation or merges. In addition, have selected several larger school districts to highlight their movement throughout the last 23 years of spending.

Figure 2

Animated Scatterplot of Nebraska Districts Per-Pupil Expenditure and Enrollment by Academic Year

The plot in Figure 2 portrays the changing landscape of student enrollment and school district per-pupil expenditures from the past 23 academic years in Nebraska. Visually, it appears as though the upward migration of data points is more elastic for school districts with fewer students whereas large school districts exhibit a slower, more gradual increase in per-pupil expenditures. You can track this by following each point as it moves up the plot’s y-axis. The selected large school districts demonstrate crawling growth rates for per-pupil expenditures when compared to the volatile rate of growth depicted in the smaller district points.

Nebraska public school funding primarily derives from local property taxes, which covers about one-third (urban) to 75% (rural) of the state’s school district budgets. Other sources include local, state, and federal sources that may include “equalization aid”. A topic of recent controversy, equalization aid funds only reach about 25% of Nebraska schools, and are primarily aimed at larger urban districts where property taxes do not fulfill school funding needs. The need for equalization aid in urban districts has escalated since agricultural land values have skyrocketed farmland and urban population have sharply increased. You can do a deeper dive into the equalization aid formula by skimming the Tax Equity and Educational Opportunities Support Act (TEEOSA) state aid documents and supplementary explanations that you can find here. A quick synopsis of the fuss is that, while the equalization aid is designed to plug holes in budgets, schools that do not receive money from the equalization aid think they deserve to. Though, from the plot in Figure 2, it is evident that smaller, often rural school districts (whom are less likely to receive equalization aid) have continued to display the benefit of being predominantly funded by local property taxes.

As a final note, it is also critical to point out that these plots do not present within-district spending changes. This is another key feature to recognize when discussing inequities in educational spending. Researchers in Illinois found that the level of spending on schools within a district had little to no connection to the number of students in poverty within each school, despite the greater needs that are often presented in low-income schools. This means that students in economically-disadvantaged schools that happen to also be in low-income districts are impacted two-fold by per-pupil expenditure inequity.

Ultimately, spending on schools in urban districts, whom educate the greatest proportion of Nebraska students, should receive funding that is commensurate with the size of their enrollment. This may include the continuation of money from the equalization aid, or from novel sources, whatever those may be.