Senate Communications Division
The Oklahoma State Senate Education Subcommittee on Appropriations will hold an interim study Wednesday to examine options to reduce administrative spending in small school districts to provide more money for classrooms.
The meeting is set for 9:30 a.m. at the State Capitol in Room 419-C.
Sen. Kyle Loveless authored legislation resulting in the study. Loveless said streamlining spending on human resources, information technology and other administrative costs in more than 200 school districts with 250 or fewer students could produce more than $39 million in savings that could be used to address a teacher shortage.
“When we have 531 school districts, that is too much overhead,” Loveless said. “Other states around us do not, and if we want the regional average on teacher pay, a way to get there would be getting rid of some of the duplication and waste in the administrative budgets of the districts all across our state. We can accomplish this without closing a single school and putting more money in our teachers’ pockets.”
I suggest they check out Peggs on the first day – that will probably set a standard to work with. At least John accomplished something by running.
School administrative costs. . . . what a fat target that will be!
Also, I believe that Kansas, with a roughly similar population and area, has around 300 school districts, in contrast to our 500-plus. If they would consider going to a county superintendent system [perhaps with a few exceptions, such as Tulsa, Osage and Oklahoma counties], that alone would reduce the number of superintendents to 77-80, save a bushel of money, and wouldn’t require closure of any schools.