Editor’s note: The Atlanta Board of Education Budget Commission will convene on Monday, May 20, 2013 for the purpose of reviewing the Atlanta Public Schools Proposed Budget for FY2014. The meeting will take place at 3 p.m. at the Center for Learning and Leadership located at 130 Trinity Avenue, and is open to the public.
APS projects $554 million in revenue for FY14 and appropriations of $615 million, which constitutes a $61 million budget gap. APS is funded by a combination of property tax revenues and state funding for education.
According to APS: “For the past few years, economic conditions have forced the district to compensate for state education funding cuts and reductions in property tax revenues through a series of austere measures, including department budget cuts, spending freezes, cutting employee cost of living increases and step increases, and building furlough days into the budget.”
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Understanding the budgets of local school districts can be very complicated. Each district classifies expenses in different ways, which makes comparisons difficult.
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In this video, I've taken a step back from the ways districts typically report their spending, and relied simply on the titles of all employees and the salaries received by those employees.
Since salaries and benefits are the biggest components of a school's budget, this comparison should provide some useful insight into the prioritities of districts in the metro area.