My old school ratio

by David Safier

I was thinking about that 1-to-1 teacher-to-bureaucrat ratio the Goldwater Institute has been throwing around.

Let's ignore for a moment the ridiculous term "bureaucrat" and just look at the ratio: one non-teacher for every teacher.

I thought back to the high school where I taught, outside Portland, Oregon, and started counting up employees in my head. I couldn't come up with a non-teacher for every teacher.

So I went to the school's website and counted to see if my memory was correct. Sure enough, it was. The school has approximately:

• 90 teachers
• 6 counselors (all credentialed teachers, but not in the classroom)
• 7 administrators
• 10 secretaries
• 15 miscellaneous people like bookkeeper, nurse, teaching assistants, campus monitors, tech support, etc.

That's 90 teachers and 38 non-teachers, a more than 2-to-1 teacher to non teacher ratio.

And that's a high school. I worked one year at an elementary school,
and I remember the non-teaching staff to be far smaller in proportion
to the number of teachers.

When you add in employees like food service people and maintenance people who work at the school, the number goes up. When you add in bus drivers who serve the whole district, the number goes up some more, but you have to divide their number by the number of schools they serve. When you add in people at the administrative office who serve the whole district, you get a few more — given the size of the district, I would say the head office has about 2-3 employees per school.

So maybe . . . maybe . . . you can get up to a 1-to-1 ratio if you count every non-teacher in a district, though I'm not sure how you would manage it. And if you factored in that some of them don't work full time, it becomes even more difficult.

Current and former teachers and administrators out there, what are/were the ratios at your schools?