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Per-student spending · FY2013–FY2024 · every district

The Ledger

A school budget passes at town meeting as one number. This page follows four lines inside it — the superintendent's office, the principals' offices, the buildings, and the teachers — kept per student, over time, against the districts you'd compare yours to. Read where the money runs high or low, and whether the gap is growing.

Part of the set: The Comparer · District Outliers · The Education Docket

1 · The superintendent's office E08 · per student

The school board and the central office, per student. Vermont books this spending to the supervisory union itself; this ledger folds it into the district. Read this account as a district-size story: central-office cost per student falls steeply with district size everywhere — U.S. districts under 5,000 students run about $526/student (FY2024), roughly where Vermont sits. Small districts are the expensive part; Vermont is a state made of them.

2 · The principals' offices E09 · per student

Principals, assistant principals, and their office staff, per student — kept exactly the way the account above is kept. This is the administration account where Vermont stands apart: roughly twice the national rate under every weighting, size band, and median tried — and unlike the account above, district size does not explain it.

3 · The buildings

Two kinds of money and one condition report. Upkeep is annual and comparable year to year. Capital arrives in lumps — a bond lands once — so this page only ever totals it.

Two honest counterweights on upkeep: as a share of current spending, Vermont (8.0%) sits below the U.S. (9.3%) — the per-student gap partly reflects Vermont's higher overall spending; and cold states are not expensive states (the seven coldest rural states average ~$1,450/student, below the U.S.), so climate does not explain the gap either.

3a · Upkeep V40 · per student

3b · Capital, totaled TCAPOUT · cumulative

What counts as capital here: construction of new buildings, additions, and major renovations; purchase of land and existing buildings; and equipment — instructional equipment, vehicles, and other durable purchases. (The federal files break it into exactly those pieces, and they sum to this total for every Vermont district.) What doesn't: routine repair and maintenance lives in the upkeep account above, and debt is separate — a bond shows up here when the money is spent on the project, not when the district pays interest or principal later.

Vermont's capital line runs far below the U.S. — the facilities story is high upkeep on aging buildings plus under-invested renewal, and the 2023 condition assessment below corroborates it rather than contradicting it.

3c · Condition Act 72 · 2023 snapshot

4 · The teachers per teacher FTE — not per student

Teaching payroll, decomposed per student = pay × staffing

The per-student figure exists — but it is two facts multiplied together, so this page never states it alone. A district can run high because it pays more, or because it staffs more teachers per student. The split says which.

Reviewed adversarial review · July 2026

Before publishing, these comparisons were attacked six ways — double-counting, method asymmetry, function coding, weighting, climate, and independent recomputation. What the record supports, stated plainly:

The claim
Vermont spends roughly 1.6–1.9× the national and rural-state per-pupil rate on school administration and about 45% more on building upkeep, while teacher pay is near the regional average and cumulative capital investment runs roughly 40% below the national rate. Both administration accounts run above the U.S. in raw dollars; district size explains much of the superintendent-office gap (see account 1), and does not explain school administration.
Census agrees
The Census Bureau's own published state table shows a bigger gap than this page: FY2024 per-pupil general administration US $351 · Vermont $566 (1.61×) and school administration US $946 · Vermont $2,039 (2.16×) — elsec24_sumtables.xlsx, Table 8. This page's figures are the conservative, same-method version.
NCES agrees
NCES's published state tables show Vermont combined administration at 1.65–1.73× the U.S. and O&M at 1.31–1.43× for FY2021–FY2023 (Digest table 236.75, 2025 ed. · 2023 ed.); Vermont's Joint Fiscal Office found the same pattern in FY2010. Three eras, three instruments, one direction.
No double-count
Vermont districts' payments to their supervisory unions sit in a separate federal accounting item (Q11) outside every account shown — verified in the F-33 methodology and empirically across all 144 Vermont rows.
Climate, tested
Cold is not the explanation for upkeep: the seven coldest rural states average about $1,450 per student on O&M — below the U.S. average.

Sources. Dollars: U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Survey of School System Finances (F-33) — general administration (E08), school administration (E09), operations & maintenance of plant (V40), total capital outlay (TCAPOUT), fall membership (V33) — FY2013–FY2024, districts grouped with their supervisory union. Teacher salary and benefits: Vermont AOE Teacher & Staff FTE report, FY2008–FY2026, teacher rows only; benefits are all benefits combined — health insurance is not separable in any public source (the pending records request to AOE targets exactly that). Survey rows averaging over $250,000 of salary per teacher FTE are excluded as data-entry errors (audited in the build log); district benefit-years reporting under $4,000 per FTE are shown as gaps — non-reporting, not cheap insurance. Condition: Vermont's 2023 Act 72 statewide facilities assessment. The U.S. and rural-states reference lines are computed from the same F-33 files and line items, enrollment-weighted (per-student = total dollars ÷ total fall membership, with zero-membership service agencies' dollars — other states' equivalent of Vermont's supervisory-union offices — kept in the numerator for symmetry); "rural states" = the nine most-rural states after Vermont by 2020 Census rural population share — Maine, West Virginia, Mississippi, Montana, Arkansas, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Alabama, Kentucky. Cross-state dollars are not adjusted for regional wage or cost differences. These comparisons survived an adversarial review (no double-counting of Vermont's union assessments — they sit in a separate F-33 item outside every account shown; see analysis/f33_comparability_review.md) and match NCES's own published state tables (Digest 236.75, FY2021–FY2023: Vermont combined administration 1.65–1.73× the U.S., operations & maintenance 1.31–1.43×) and the Vermont JFO's FY2010 brief. The superintendent-office account is presented as a district-size story because size-matched U.S. peers run at Vermont's rate; school administration is not explained by size. Teacher-salary reference lines: NCES Digest of Education Statistics table 211.60 (NEA-collected state estimates, editions 2013–2022; the series was discontinued after school year 2021–22, so those lines end at FY2022); the rural line is the unweighted mean of the same nine states. The Digest's own Vermont figure lands within ~1–2% of this page's AOE-derived statewide average — two independent instruments in agreement. Districts that merged under Act 46 begin their money series at the first year the merged district reports; predecessor mapping is future work, so earlier years are shown as gaps, never as estimates. The pickers list the unified and union districts that report as single, complete systems (28 of Vermont's ~53 supervisory unions); traditional multi-town supervisory unions — and four partial groups whose teacher-to-student ratios exposed incomplete federal coverage — appear once member-district mapping is built.

What this page does not claim. Above or below the comparison basis is a fact, not a verdict — districts differ in geography, buildings, and needs this page does not price. Nothing here totals to a budget, by design.