Kansas school support

An interactive visualization of data provided to members of the Kansas 2015 Special Committee on K-12 Student Success.

The Kansas 2015 Special Committee on K-12 Student Success held its first meeting on October 23. As part of the meeting, data on school spending was made available. Of particular interest may be the data on instruction spending.

Dale M. Dennis, Deputy Commissioner of Education, provided committee members these definitions of instruction spending categories:

Instruction — Includes the activities dealing directly with the interaction between teachers and students. This catgory [sic] includes only regular and part-time teachers, teacher aides or assistants, homebound teachers, hospital-based teachers, substitute teachers, and teachers on sabbatical leave.

Student Support Services — Includes the following services: attendance and social work, guidance, health, psychological, speech pathology and audiology.

Instructional Support Services — Includes the following services: improvement of instruction, library and media, instruction-related technology, and academic student assessment.

Committee members were supplied with spreadsheets holding one year’s spending. I’ve gathered the spreadsheets for the three years that were provided and present them in one interactive visualization. One view of the data shows the data items for each school district, with the three years shown together. I added amount per pupil calculations.

A second view shows the per-pupil values as a line graph over the three years.

This spending data represents Kansas state support only and does not include spending from federal or local funding sources. The provided data was not adjusted for inflation.

Click here to open the visualization in a new window. Visualization created using Tableau Public.