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Board walkthrough of ED279 funding worksheet shows how enrollment and staffing drive per-pupil rates
Summary
Business manager Andrea Dish walked the board through the ED279 worksheet, explaining attendance counts, staff-to-student ratios and how the state maps local salaries into a matrix that produces the district’s elementary and secondary per-pupil rates (about $8,353 and $8,870 in the presented calculation).
The RSU 11 board reviewed the state ED279 funding worksheet on June 18 to better understand how enrollment trends and staffing choices translate into the district subsidy.
Andrea Dish, the district’s business manager, led the step‑by‑step presentation. She explained that ED279 starts by calculating per-pupil costs using attending-student counts (typically a two-year average) and recommended staff‑to‑student ratios. "The state takes our staff based on their credentials and places our staff in their matrix," Dish said, describing how local head counts and credentials are converted to a standardized state salary total.
Key takeaways: Dish walked the board through several numerics examples: the state’s recommended teacher FTE calculation produced a notional 108.73 teacher FTE for the district while the local report showed 125.6 teachers; the state maps that staffing into a matrix equivalency (example figure given ~8,200,247 in matrix dollars) and applies the EPS percentage to arrive at an allowable amount that then becomes part of elementary and secondary per-pupil rates. Dish presented resulting per-pupil rates from the worksheet of roughly $8,353 for elementary students and $8,870 for secondary students.
Staffing and regional adjustments: Dish highlighted areas where the district diverges from state ratios — for example, the district shows relatively high nurse and guidance/social-work staffing and lower librarian FTEs (many schools use library ed techs rather than full librarians). A regional adjustment also applies (the district’s regional factor was cited as about 0.95 in the example), which reduces the computed allocation relative to higher-cost regions.
Other changes and siloes: Dish noted that adult-education counts are being separated from the ED279 calculation and will be funneled directly to adult ed; CDS (three-year-old) funding was described as siloed and, for now, being distributed as an early allocation distinct from the ED279 computation.
Next steps: The presentation was intended to give the board the context needed for upcoming budget deliberations and decisions about potential program consolidation or local choices that affect staffing and facilities.
