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Revenues and Expenditures for Public Elementary and Secondary School Districts: School Year 2005–06 (Fiscal Year 2006)
NCES 2008-345
July 2008

Introduction

This report presents data from the School District Finance Survey for School Year 2005–06 (fiscal year 2006, or FY 06). The School District Finance Survey is a district-level survey that consists of data submitted annually to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) by state education agencies (SEAs) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. All financial transactions associated with assets, expenditures, revenues, and indebtedness are accounted for, including revenues from federal, state, and local sources and expenditures in categories such as instruction and instruction-related activities, student support services, administration, operation, capital outlay, and debt services.

The School District Finance survey is part of the Common Core of Data (CCD) surveys that collect administrative records data from SEAs. The data are collected and edited by the Governments Division of the U.S. Census Bureau for NCES. All 50 states and the District of Columbia provided data for FY 06.

A variety of types of local education agencies are reported in the School District Finance Survey. While agencies whose only function is to collect and allocate funds or to provide certain administrative services for a group of districts are also included on the file, this report focuses on regular public school districts and charter school districts.1

For tables 1 through 6 in this report, all regular school districts that have student counts greater than zero and that are listed in the CCD Local Education Agency Universe Survey file for school year 2005–06 were included in the analyses. There were 15,335 such districts in FY 06. National figures do not include independent charter school districts; however, charter schools affiliated with regular school districts are included in the national and state figures. Data for independent charter school districts are reported separately at the end of tables 1 through 4 and are included in tables 5 and 6.

Table 7 presents the revenues and current expenditures of the 100 largest school districts according to the size of their student enrollment, as reported in the School District Finance Survey.

The federal revenues table (table 8) includes all local education agencies reported in the School District Finance Survey.

Please see Appendix A: Methodology and Technical Notes for more information about survey content and methodology. Appendix B is a glossary of key CCD terms used in this report.

More information about CCD surveys and products is available at the CCD website.

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1 In this report, regular school districts exclude districts that administer only vocational and special education schools and independent charter schools. Education service agencies and other agencies that do not operate schools are also excluded from regular school districts in this report. Regular school districts may operate charter schools in addition to noncharter schools. Independent charter school districts operate only charter schools. The definitions of regular school districts, independent charter school districts, and charter schools can be found in Appendix B: Common Core of Data Glossary.