I’ve written about the hemorrhaging of Duluth students out of the Duluth School District before. Those figures are still being compiled and when they are complete one more aspect of the disaster that is the Red Plan will be revealed.
I asked Gary Glass a few weeks ago to show me the latest WADM report. I had spent a couple hours picking through my old school board files looking for an example of one from my era. I found one from the fall of 1999. Gary gave me the one from April 1st 2009. April Fools day! It turned out to be very appropriate.
Gary didn’t know what the significance of WADMs were because no one had bothered to tell him and he’s never been at a meeting where anyone ever commented on the Report. Its one of the most important pieces of data for the District.
WADM is an acronym which stands for Weighted Average Daily Membership. Its formulaic in much the same way that teachers are described at FTE’s or “full time equivalents.” If you have a teacher who teaches for one class or .2 FTE’s and another teacher who teaches four classes or .8 FTE’s then between them you have one whole FTE or one full time teacher.
In the case of students they pull state revenue into the school district but not all students pull it equally. Kindergartens only count for .612 of a full WADM. The average state revenue a full WADM pulls in is roughly $6,600. That means our District gets about $4,039 for each of our kindergartners. Because secondary school students need a whole raft of teachers they get more state revenue. A secondary student is 1.3 Wadms or $6,600 times 1.3 or $8,580.
You can see the weighted values in the April 1st report below.
$6,600 per WADM is a lot of money. Every child who open enrolls out of our District costs us money. We lose $6,600 for each WADM that leaves.
At last night’s school board Business Committee meeting Gary asked about the WADMS. No one seemed to know what they were. The other School Board members were irritated once again that Gary was wasting their time asking his damn questions.
When he went through the report he asked if the report meant that under the Open Enrollment portion the 143 WADMs was net inflow or outflow. The way its listed on this report it certainly looks like were gaining more students than we are losing. This is not true. Once again we found the correct figures by asking the staff of the Minnesota Department of Education.
These are the figures from from 07-08 Final District ADM Summary:
Incoming students
OPEN ENROLL…..143
TUITION…………269 (Mostly Special Education and Residential Treatment Students)
INELIGIBLE………. 25 (Other States and Foreign Students)
TOTAL IN………..437
Outgoing students:
OPEN ENROLL……492
TUITION……………61
TOTAL OUT………553
Open enrollment for 07-08 would be calculated this way
NET OPEN ENROLL IS (143-492) = -349 We have lost 349 WADMS to other Districts. Multiply that by $6,600 and it has cost us $2.3 million.
This year even more students are exiting the District. Every District beyond Duluth has more applications for open enrollment than ever from the Duluth School District.
The Business Director, Bill Hanson, looked at the Report when Gary asked about it and told Gary that he thought we were having a net increase in WADMs from Open Enrollment. The Superintendent didn’t correct him. No one corrected him.
This is beyond amazing.
