In selling his merit bonus plan and other plans to hobble help public education, Governor Dennis Daugaard has been touting his statistics on employment in our public K-12 public school system:
In 1971, South Dakota had 173,006 students, 8,452 certified teachers, and another 5,436 "non-teachers" &ndash everything from administrators and aides to cooks and janitors.
Forty years later, there were 123,629 students in K-12 schools. That is a decline of just under 50,000 students in forty years &ndash a drop of about 28 percent. During that same period, while student numbers were falling, we have added 869 new teachers. Today we have more than 9,300 teachers, an increase of about 10 percent. So we are employing over 800 more teachers to educate 50,000 fewer students.
We have also seen a dramatic increase in "other staff" over the past forty years. From the 5,436 in 1971, we have increased to 9,005. That is an increase of 3,569, or 66%. Today, we have over 9,300 teachers and just over 9,000 other staff. Our schools employ nearly as many non-teachers as teachers [Gov. Dennis Daugaard, State of the State address, Pierre, SD, 2012.01.10].
By the percentages, the teacher-to-student ratio has increased 54%; the staff-to-student ratio has increased 85%.
Meanwhile in Pierre...
Governor Daugaard supports his plan by stating the South Dakota K-12 employee to student ratio has increased by 84.7% since 1971. What was not mentioned is that the State employee to citizen per capita ratio has grown by 101.3% as compared to the Sioux Falls School District's employee to student ratio's growth of 75.1% during the same timeframe [Superintendent Pam Homan, e-mail to Sioux Falls School District staff, 2012.01.19].
Tripp-Delmont superintendent Lynn Vlasman makes a similar point in Friday's Mitchell Daily Republic. Also not mentioned by Governor Daugaard: any plan to give merit bonuses to one out of five members of the ever-expanding state employee pool.