D-86 Spends Third More Per Student At South

HINSDALE, IL — Heated arguments have long taken place about whether Hinsdale South High School gets the short end of the stick compared with Hinsdale Central.

By one measure, though, Hinsdale South appears to get a much better deal. According to the Illinois Report Card website, Hinsdale High School District 86 spent $27,496 per student last year at Hinsdale South, nearly a third greater than Central's $21,010.

This disparity represents the public policy of spending more money at schools that have greater needs, which is usually schools with bigger shares of low-income students.

As of last school year, nearly a quarter of South's students came from low-income families, compared with Central's 5 percent.

District 86 strives to spend its money equitably, its chief financial officer, Josh Stephenson, said in an expenditure report.

"By allocating our funding in an equitable manner, we are able to address the difference in the economies of scale in our buildings, and, more importantly, meet the diverse needs of our students," Stephenson said.

Last year's figures show that La Grange School District 102 also spent the most money per student at schools with greater shares of low-income students.

"This was done by design," Superintendent Kyle Schumacher said in an email. "Through both local and (federal) Title funds, we utilize additional resources at Congress Park and Forest Road to support our students where they are. This is both a philosophical and intentional effort to provide resources to where they are needed most."

In Elmhurst School District 205, though, the elementary school with the most low-income students by far received the third least money per student among the city's eight elementaries. About 60 percent of students at Conrad Fischer Elementary School are low-income, compared with a range of 2 percent to 9 percent at the city's other seven schools.

The Daily Herald recently looked at school districts in Algonquin and Elgin, where schools with bigger shares of low-income students got the short end of the stick financially. The newspaper interviewed Marguerite Roza, an economist at Georgetown University and the director of its Economics Lab, who has studied school districts' spending choices.

"Those are very much district choices, but districts would say, 'What? We never made an intentional decision to give more money to the wealthier schools,'" Roza told the Daily Herald.

Rucker Johnson, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, said his team has connected per-student spending to better outcomes in standardized test scores and graduation rates, according to the Daily Herald.

"At every stage, higher spending led to significant increases in student outcomes and narrowing of achievement gaps by race and poverty status," Johnson told the newspaper.