To the Editor and fellow members of the Hopewell Valley Community:
Let me start by highlighting that I am at present a member of the Hopewell Valley Regional Board of Education, elected by Pennington Borough, where I reside. The opinions expressed in this letter are my own and not those of the Board. I am not authorized to speak on behalf of the Board on any of these matters. As in my previous article here, I will, in any case, stick mostly to facts and figures.
This letter is prompted once again by the commentary by our esteemed former mayors, Ms. Sandom and Mr. Hart in the most recent issue of the Hopewell Express. As before, they highlight some important data that is available by the BOE. Alas, while the BOE provides a treasure trove of data, it is not always easy to interpret. The unfortunate result is that the former mayors’ key conclusions are simply wrong.
Let me get straight to the point, under “Claim 3” Ms. Sandom and Mr. Hart assert: “Yet, HVRSD’s actual per pupil spending on our elementary students is among the lowest of all school districts in Mercer County. Conversely, the district’s per pupil spending on central administration is far and away the highest of all school districts in Mercer County.” The data illustrated in the graph below (also reproduced from their article) is used to justify this statement:
Figure 1: Chart 3 from the Hopewell Express commentary (https://www.communitynews.org/towns/hopewell-express/commentary-what-does-hvrsd-spend-per-pupil-and-why-should-we-care/article_a6930842-d36d-428b-a169-0997643e6164.html
While the data is correct and can be found here: http://rc.doe.state.nj.us/, the mayor’s interpretation of the data is dead wrong. This data highlights per-school spending vs. centralized district spending. Note the emphasis on district not office. In fact, no conclusion as to education spending vs. administrative overhead can be drawn from this data.
The “per-school” spending in this data set is not necessarily classroom spending and “central district” spending is not necessarily administrative overhead. These figures reflect how each district chooses to assign various expenditures – to the district overall vs each individual school. For example, staff salaries are typically assigned to the school where a staff member teaches. However overhead, such as health benefits, may be assigned to schools or allocated to the “central district.” Conversely, administrative overhead (e.g. a secretary’s salary) may be assigned to a school. This is also the reason why there is such a huge discrepancy between the central district spend across the various districts in the chart – they allocate expenses differently. Bottom line: no conclusions regarding classroom vs. overhead expenditure can be drawn from the data in Figure 1.
It should also be noted that the figure is not drawn to scale, distorting the “central district” contribution for HVRSD. For completeness, I present a properly scaled figure below (doing my best to match the original color scheme)
Figure 2: Figure 1, re-drawn to proper scale.
At this point, you may (should!) ask what our administrative overhead is and how it compares to other districts. This data is present in the other data source (TGES) that our former mayors used, alas also incorrectly (for example their Chart 1 mixes data from two different school years). This data set is rather large (over 20 Excel files) and can be cryptic, although the state does provide a handy guide to anyone interested in digging in: https://nj.gov/education/guide/docs/2024/2024_TGES_Installation_Instructions.pdf (it’s called installation instructions, but there is no SW to install, its just a guide to the Excel files). Among the 20+ key indicators, the data contains total and budgetary per pupil spend as well as classroom spend and administrative spend. For those not inclined to dig through all that data (I don’t blame you!), I present the results below. These are for the 2022-23 school year – the last year for which all data is available (some but not all is available for 2023-24 school year). I also note the Excel files and KPI names in chart captions – so anyone who does want to reproduce these should be able to do so quickly.
Figure 3: Total and Budgetary per pupil spend, SY 2022-23. Source: CSG1AA PP21A and CSG1 PP21
Figure 4: Classroom and Admin per pupil spend. Source: CSG2 PP22 and CSG8 PP28
Figure 5: K-12 Student – to – Teacher ratio. Source: CSG16 STRAT0016
What conclusions can we draw from this? As the mayors point out, our per-pupil spend is higher (or was higher in 2022-23) the other districts, but that is directly related to our low student-to-teacher ratio. In 2022-23 we were the only district in Mercer County with a student-to-teacher ratio below 10. This is, in any case, likely to change with the impact of new development pushing up class sizes.
While Hopewell Valley’s per-pupil spending is on the higher end for Mercer County, that investment overwhelmingly supports instruction and smaller class sizes—not administrative overhead. The data simply does not support the claim that the district is overspending on central administration. In fact, when viewed accurately, our administrative costs are comparable to other districts and modest relative to the resources we devote directly to students.
I encourage all community members to explore the publicly available data themselves and approach these discussions with both curiosity and care. Our schools deserve honest, well-informed conversations.
Sincerely,
Alex Reznik
Pennington Borough Representative
Hopewell Valley Regional Board of Education (writing as a private citizen)
