You can't have a humongous Staffing number in the Preliminary School Budget for 2024-25 and Not provide any Headcount information

Well, they are no longer putting out school budgets where you can see the detail behind each line item and going solely with the DoE 'User Friendly' format - which is more of an overview and isn't so detailed or user friendly.

Be that as it may, you might want to pay attention to this budget, albeit lacking sufficient detail to make sense of any of the numbers including the changes from the prior year, especially with no headcount analysis for the single largest expenditure in the school budget - Salaries.

You really can't understand if the Salary dollars in this budget or the changes from last year's budget make any sense, without a corresponding Salary & Headcount analysis by department.

For example, in this school budget for Principals/ Assistant Principals/Prog Dir it has $7,370,892 for the Actual 2022-23, $7,744,954 for the Revised 2023-24 Budget and $7,970,674 for the Proposed 2024-25 Budget. 

Now, how can you know how they went from $7,744,954 to $7,970,674 without knowing what the changes were in dollars and heads?

You won't know unless they provide the changes and they're not going to with this school budget - I know, I asked. 

There has to be an analysis of Salaries in dollars and heads that bridges the gap between the prior year and the Proposed budget that shows salary and wage increases, new hires, transfers-in & other additions, retirements, resignations, terminations, transfers-out and other decreases.

Without that information, you'll never know if their proposed budget for salaries is satisfactory or unsatisfactory.

So, the latest Salary information available from a request for the current salary file was received on 1/4/24.  This file is by name, location, department, title and salary. This will at least show you the current headcount and dollars by title that should help in understanding where they are today in a more detailed manner.

Here's what that file looks like by Salary Range:

Here's the breakdown by Title from that file which listed 2,296 employees for a total of $173,044,900:

Anyhoo, at least you got to actually see their Preliminary School Budget for 2024-25 before they adopt it but this 'User Friendly' format won't give you what you need to know about what's in this school budget - especially with Staffing.