Surprises

It surprises Pittsburgh Schooler that that there is still so much that surprises him. A run of the mill attack on Head Start in this Sunday's NYT (op-ed here) included this shocker:

to keep a child in Head Start full-time, year-round, costs about $22,600.

Turns out fact checking is a little difficult because this is the author's own calculation (details here).

But the cost per child number got me wondering what our local school districts' spend per child.

And here is your real surprise for reading this blog (straight from a PA Department of Education publication), Pittsburgh Public Schools was spending $19,294 per student in 2006-2007. The good news is that other districts are spending significantly less; the median among the 43 districts in Allegheny County was $13,049.