My question is what's the mill rate in the towns that ranked higher than Oxford?
How many students do these other towns have? How many schools are in those towns? What's the number of students in each classroom? There are so many factors that may lead to spending more or less per student.
I'd like to see Center School up on Great Oak Rd where the other schools are, would it be cost effective to put additions on both Quakerfarms and Great Oak and run 2 schools instead of 3? Split up the grades in both school and make Quaker Farms K thru 4 and Great Oak 5 thru 8??? So many questions......

Bonnie our schools are great right now, I'm so happy with my son's experience at OCS and now GOMS --please don't rush to reorganize everything. We're already low low on ed spending list, and just as I say that seems to be okay so too don't go further savings-hunting to the point of disrupting something that's working great. The teams seem to be working great as is.

Good Morning,

I have to respectfully disagree. As a member of the NOSPBC I have had the opportunity to tour all of our school facilities and listen to our educators and school personnel. In my personal opinion, I believe at best our facilities (with maybe the exception of the high school) are woefully inadequate for today’s students and at worst could pose safety issues such as walking between OCS and the offsite campus buildings during the winter. Just take a look at the facilities report done several years ago and you will begin to get a clear picture of the issues we need to address at each school.

As a town and community we need to make the right investments in our children’s future. And just to be clear, my children have already graduated and, moved on to college.

There are umpteen ways to look at the statistics regarding education. Per student spending just scratches the surface. An interesting followup would present other parameters such as comparing per student spending with student body performance on standardized tests, dropout rates, etc. Throwing money at something does not necessarily lead to improvement and, in fact, may lead to inefficiency. Look at our federal government.

To throw another monkey wrench into this debate, which can go on and on, I don't necessarily think standardized test scores tell us all we need to know about how well students are learning or the quality of the school or school district. However, I realize it's one of the few tools we have to measure student success.

And yet another - note the Note:

"Note: The state says the per pupil rating includes all current public elementary, school and secondary expenditures from all sources, excluding reimbursable regular education transportation, tuition revenue, capital expenditures for land, buildings and equipment and debt service."

Spending on facilities do nothing to "move the needle" on the per-pupil figures. I have often wanted to see an apples-to-apples comparison on government versus private/parochial education; trouble is, capital expenditures (and the associated debt service) are essentially off-budget on the government side. No private entitty could get away with this.