Analyzing Contrasts

Although the intent of WADA (Weighted Average Daily Attendance) is to provide more money and professionals working directly with students in District 1 than in District 2 due to the percentage of economically disadvantaged students, this was not the case. District 1 has 93.3% of its student population that is economically disadvantaged while District 2 only has 20.7%. District 1 should have received more money because not only does it have a significantly larger percentage of economically disadvantaged students, it also has higher percentages of LEP, Bilingual/ESL Education students. These special populations require intensive instruction and would benefit from a lower teacher to student ratio.
District 1 has a WADA of $5,555.815 and District 2 has a WADA of $4,794.076. It would appear that District 1 would have more money to hire more professionals to work with students and have a lower teacher to student ration; however, this is not indicated in the actual reported figures. As indicated in Part 2, District 1 had a budget that was $6,522,508.80 smaller than District 2. While they had the same number of teachers, District 2 actually had more funds to provide better instruction, and remediation if necessary, than District 1. The way that the state allocates funds to the districts does not provide the assistance to the poorer districts as it should. Even though the state provides a larger WADA for the special populations, in the end the funding comes up extremely short.