Nifty New Financial Reports from the Louisiana Department of Education

As we wrote about last month, the Louisiana Department of Education (LDE) recently added new features to its website. Here, we want to give a little more attention to one of the new features in particular – school-level financial data. LDE has created one-page reports that present financial data for individual schools. A report is available for every school in Louisiana.

Specifically, these reports provide data on expenditures, enrollment, and staffing. In the financial section, the expenditure data are broken out into major categories, such as instruction, administration, and transportation. Overall expenditures per pupil (not including capital expenditures) and central office expenditures per pupil are reported. Under the enrollment section, student counts by grade and staff counts are provided. In the salaries section, school average salaries are reported side-by-side with the same data for the school’s LEA (local education agency; in most cases, the district) and the state. Also, the degree level and average years of experience is given.

The primary reason that this new information is so exciting is that these reports are the first time that school-level financial data has been made available for all district-run schools in the state. The other financial data on LDE’s website is at the LEA level. This means that it had been difficult if not impossible to see variations between schools within districts.

The school-level reports present a good deal of information in a clear, easily understandable format. They allow stakeholders to quickly put together a picture of several key pieces of information about schools. Because the sheets are standardized, they can be used to compare schools – within districts or even across districts. Also, because the most recent two years’ worth of data are already posted and subsequent years will added in the future, changes over time can be examined.

These new reports are an investment in financial transparency on the part of the LDE. Not only has the Department increased the amount and type of data that are available, but it has done so in a way that makes the data very usable.

You can find this new information by going to LDE’s main webpage and clicking on the clicking on the “School-by-School Financial Data” under the heading “Shortcuts to Facts & Information.” Data is available for 2008-2009 and 2009-2010.