School level expenditure reporting project update:

Revised 1/6/10:
The Department is working with school business officials to define the process for collecting 2008-09 school level expenditure information required of all school districts that are receiving ARRA Title I Part A funds in 2009-10.  Please note that the expenditure data to be collected is for state and local funds only and excludes all federal funds (including ARRA) and special education expenditures. The attached guidance from the U.S. Department of Education provides additional detail for your planning purposes.

 

The US Department of Education sent the following message to us last week concerning the December 1, 2009 deadline for school districts to report to their state education agency. The Department will establish a process and a time line responsive to their new guidance and communicate it to all districts that must comply.  We encourage all school districts that are receiving ARRA Title I Part A funds in 2009-10 to begin to identify expenditures related to instructional and support staff for the 2008-09 school year at the school level, for all schools in the district.  We hope to provide school districts with approximately four weeks to complete this task and will communicate more details, as soon as they are available. 

 

The US Department of Education wrote on November 23, 2009:

We recognize that the December 1 deadline for LEA reporting is fast approaching, and many LEAs may have difficulty complying with that time line.  However, even if there are data reporting delays at the local level, the statutory provision has built in sufficient time to enable States to meet the March 31 deadline.  We expect LEAs will make good faith efforts to compile the required data as quickly as possible and to ensure that they submit high-quality and accurate data.  Under the circumstances, however, it would not be appropriate or necessary to take enforcement action against LEAs that do not meet the December 1 deadline.  States may wish to work with their LEAs to establish a process and time line that will enable the State to meet the March 31 reporting deadline and ensure that the State provides complete and accurate data to the Department.

 

U.S. Department of Education

Study of School-Level Expenditures

Form A:

Data Reporting Instructions for School‑Level Expenditure Data for State Educational Agencies and

Local Educational Agencies

 

November 19, 2009 

 

 

According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, no persons are required to respond to a collection of information unless it displays a valid OMB number.  The valid OMB control number of this information collection is 1875-0255.  The time required to complete this information collection is estimated to average 40 hours per district response and 741 hours per state response, including the time to review instructions, search existing data resources, gather the data needed, and complete and review the information collection. 

If you have any comments concerning the accuracy of the time estimates(s) or suggestion for improving this form, please write to: U.S. Department of Education, Washington, 20202-4651. 

If you have comments or concerns regarding the status of your individual submission of this form, write directly to: Policy and Program Studies Service, Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development, U.S. Department of Education, 400 Maryland Avenue SW, Room 6W203, Washington, DC 20202-8240.

General Instructions for This Data Collection 

Purpose of data collection.  The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) requires each school district receiving Title I, Part A ARRA funds to report a school-by-school listing of per-pupil educational expenditures from state and local funds for the 2008-09 school year to its state educational agency (SEA), and also requires states to report these data to the Department by March 31, 2010.  These data will be used to examine the extent to which school-level education resources are distributed equitably within and across school districts.

Data collection year.  Please provide expenditure data for the full 2008-09 school year.  You may use the standard start and end dates that are commonly used to define “school year” in your state.

Format of materials. States should submit the school-level expenditure data in electronic form via e-mail, ftp transfer, or regular mail.  To minimize reporting burden for states, we will accept data in whatever format is most convenient for you to provide. Data can be in ASCII (text) format, in spreadsheet files (e.g., Excel, Access), or in word processing files (e.g., WordPerfect or Microsoft Word). Please indicate the type of file and format (Windows, or Macintosh):

 

• E-mail. Files may be sent via e-mail to SchoolLevelExpend@rti.org.

• Secure electronic file upload site. Larger files may be submitted electronically through RTI’s file upload Web site at edsurveys.rti.org/SchoolLevelExpenditures.  If you would like to use this option, please contact Ruth Heuer at RTI at (919) 541-6457 or heuer@rti.org to obtain a unique username and password.

• Regular mail.  Data may be sent on a CD-ROM or diskette to:

Ruth Heuer

RTI International

P. O. Box 12194

Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2194

 

A data collector from RTI International will contact each SEA to discuss this data collection to help determine the least burdensome way for states to provide the required information.  

Amount of time required to respond to this data collection.  We ask that each district and state provide an estimate of the number of hours that they spent responding to this data collection, so that we may improve the accuracy of our burden hour estimates.

If you have questions or would like more information about this study, you may contact Ruth Heuer at RTI International at (919) 541-6457 or heuer@rti.org, or Stephanie Stullich at the U.S. Department of Education at (202) 401-2342 or stephanie.stullich@ed.gov.

Thank you for your cooperation with this data collection.

Requirement to Cooperate With This Data Collection

The statutory language for this data collection requirement is included in the section of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 that authorizes the appropriation of an additional $13 billion in Title I Part A funds, and reads as follows:

For an additional amount for “Education for the Disadvantaged” to carry out title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (“ESEA”), $13,000,000,000: Provided, That $5,000,000,000 shall be available for targeted grants under section 1125 of the ESEA: Provided further, That $5,000,000,000 shall be available for education finance incentive grants under section 1125A of the ESEA: Provided further, That $3,000,000,000 shall be for school improvement grants under section 1003(g) of the ESEA: Provided further, That each local educational agency receiving funds available under this paragraph shall be required to file with the State educational agency, no later than December 1, 2009, a school-by-school listing of per-pupil educational expenditures from State and local sources during the 2008–2009 academic year: Provided further, That each State educational agency shall report that information to the Secretary of Education by March 31, 2010.

 

Thus, the ARRA statute requires districts that receive Title I, Part A ARRA funds (i.e., funds allocated under the Targeted Grants and Education Finance Incentive Grants formulas) to report school-level per-pupil expenditures. 

 

The Department has sought to minimize the burden of this mandated data collection on states and school districts in the following ways.  First, we are defining “school-level expenditures” using expenditure classifications that are already used in existing National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and U.S. Census Bureau fiscal data collections at the district level.  Second, we are focusing on school-level expenditures related to instruction and support functions, and are not asking for school-level expenditure data for functions that are commonly accounted for at the district level such as facilities operations and maintenance, transportation, or food services.  Third, we are asking respondents to exclude employee benefits, which may be supported and accounted for through multiple funding mechanisms.  Finally, we are asking districts and states to only report those non-personnel expenditures that were tracked at the school level in district and state data systems for the 2008-09 school year.

Definition of School-Level Expenditures to Be Included in This Data Collection

In general, LEAs and SEAs should report school-level expenditures that are associated with regular K-12 instruction, instructional support, pupil support, and school administration.  More specifically, LEAs and SEAs should report the following four categories of school-level expenditures from state and local funds:

• Personnel salaries at the school level for all school-level instructional and support staff, based on the Census Bureau’s classification used in the F‑33 survey of local government finances.
• Personnel salaries at the school level for instructional staff only.
• Personnel salaries at the school level for teachers only.
• Non-personnel expenditures at the school level (if available).

Table A-1 shows the Census Bureau’s classification of four types of school-level personnel that are involved in instructional and support functions, based on the F-33 survey of local government finances (see Table A-2 for more detail):

 

Table A-1

Types of School-Level Personnel Involved in Instruction and Support Functions

 

 

Additional instructions for reporting school-level expenditures.  LEAs and SEAs should use the following guidelines, to the extent possible, in compiling data on school-level expenditures:

• Exclude expenditures from federal program funds.  However, a district may include funds from Impact Aid or from the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund (SFSF) if the district is using those funds under the authority in Impact Aid.

• Exclude expenditures from special education funds.

• Exclude expenditures for programs that are not associated with regular K-12 instruction, instructional support, and school administration (e.g., preschool, adult education, and school nutrition programs).

• Exclude programs that serve students from more than one school attendance area at a single school site (e.g., summer school programs sometimes are housed in a subset of the district’s schools but serve students from throughout the school district).

LEAs and SEAs may also exclude expenditures made by regional education agencies for school-level resources, if data on the amount of resources that these regional agencies provided in individual schools is not currently available.

Salary expenditures.  LEAs and SEAs should use the following guidelines, to the extent possible, in compiling school-level salary expenditures:

• Include all types of salary expenditures, including not only base salaries but also incentive pay, bonuses, and supplemental stipends for mentoring or other additional roles. 
• Exclude expenditures for employee benefits.

Non-personnel expenditures.  LEAs and SEAs should include non-personnel expenditures associated with instruction, instructional support, and pupil support, and school administration, if this information is available at the school-level.  This may include the following types of expenditures:

• Professional development for teachers and other staff.
• Instructional materials and supplies.
• Computers, software, and other technology.
• Contracted services such as distance learning services.
• Library books and media center learning materials.

Table A-3 provides specifications for the data files that LEAs and SEAs are expected to submit in response to this requirement. LEAs and SEAs should also complete the checklist in Table A-4 to indicate the characteristics of the expenditure data that they are submitting.

Rationale for the Department’s Approach for Meeting the ARRA Requirement to Collect Data on School-Level Expenditures

The Department of Education recognizes that reporting school-level expenditure data may be a challenging task for many states and school districts, because state and district financial data systems that were in place for the 2008-09 school year may not have tracked expenditures for individual schools.  However, we also know that school districts typically have personnel data systems that can identify which staff are assigned to each school, and at a minimum they should be able to extract and report salary data for school-level staff; indeed, many states already collect and compile such school-level personnel expenditure data.  Data on personnel salaries do not provide a complete picture of school-level resources, but they account for the majority of expenditures that occur at the school level.  In addition, some districts and states have more comprehensive data systems in place that can track and report non-personnel expenditures as well. 

Rationale for specific components of this data collection:

• Salaries for all school-level instructional and support staff.  This is expected to capture the majority of school-level expenditures for instructional and support functions. 

• Salaries for instructional staff only and for teachers only.  Teachers and other instructional staff are particularly important to the educational opportunities provided to students, and the study will examine the distribution of these resources separately, in addition to examining the distribution of total reported school-level expenditures. 

• Non-personnel expenditures at the school level (if available).  Non-personnel expenditures are an important component of total educational resources provided in a school.  Collecting these data will permit a more complete examination of the distribution of school-level expenditures where this is supported by existing data systems.  

• Inclusion of all types of salary expenditures, including not only base salaries but also incentive pay, bonuses, and supplemental stipends for mentoring or other additional roles.  Supplemental pay can be an important component of total staff compensation and should be included in an examination of school-level expenditures.

• Exclusion of expenditures from federal programs.  The ARRA requirement is to report only expenditures from state and local funding sources, because federal programs are intended to supplement an equitably-distributed base of state and local resources.   

• Exclusion of special education expenditures.  Because special education expenditures will vary in relation to the numbers and types of students with disabilities in a particular school, excluding these expenditures, if possible, would provide a more meaningful picture of the equitable distribution of school-level funds.   

• Exclusion of employee benefits.  State and district practices for supporting and accounting for employee benefits vary widely.  Excluding employee benefits will reduce the burden of this data collection for states and districts and also reduce potential problems with the comparability of the data.

Specifications for Data Submissions 

Table A-2

Expenditures Associated with Instruction Based on the

Census Bureau’s F-33 Survey of Local Government Finances

 

 

Table A-3

Specifications for Data to Be Included in LEA and SEA Reports

on School-Level Expenditures in 2008-09

 

 

 

Table A-4

Checklist on Definitions of School-Level Expenditures

(asterisk indicates preferred definition)

 

 

 

 

Table A-5

Estimated Number of Hours Spent Responding to This Data Collection