Healthy school finance worksheet
I recently co-facilitated a workshop called Back to School Finance through the Debt Collective. The idea was to do a training on how to start looking at school district finances and then organize.
It was awesome (here’s a recording). We had 200 people sign up and then 65 people from all over the country came.
And we’re doing another one this week! Friday, October 3rd, at 8pm EST online. Sign up here!
At the center of the training is a document I drafted (with the help of readers of this newsletter!) called the Healthy School Finance Worksheet.
Inspired by the work of the Coalition Against Campus Debt, the worksheet has step by step instructions to find and analyze financial documents about public school districts in the US, understanding those documents in the context of racial capitalism.
This week, I’m passing along a link to this worksheet for you to download and try out! We’re going to be building on it for future trainings, so if you have questions, ideas, feedback, please let me know by responding to this email.
Here’s an overview of what you see in the spreadsheet.
First, you map your district using climate maps, demographic maps, and fiscal maps from various sources (all linked in the spreadsheet). Using these maps, you fill in numbers having to do with poverty, property value, student racial demographics, climate risk scores, and full-time employee counts.
Second, you find two financial documents for your district: (1) the most recent certified audited financial report, and (2) the most recent bond statement associated with your district. The best way to find these is EMMA, but there are other ways too.
Using these documents, you find certain data points about the district, including expenditure on salaries, expenditure on instruction, expenditure on debt payments, interest on debt, as well as information about where this money goes: credit rating agencies, banksters, etc.
Finally, we’ve got two “ripoff measures,” which calculate how many teachers the district’s debt could hire, as well as debt as a percentage of instruction expenditure.
We want everyone, from union members to parents to students to community members interested in school finance, to be able to look up these data and figure this stuff together. We’re hoping this can help spur organizing efforts: campaigns, groups, demands, policy changes, even school board candidacies.
Again, this is just the beginning! In more detailed worksheets, I’d like to include data points about pension contributions, discount rates, and intergovernmental grants broken down by category like special education, transportation, and the like.
And if you want to do me a solid, pre-order my book here! I write this newsletter for free, but a great way to pay me back is to pre-order.