So I'm a little late to this one as I was pretty busy last week and on vacation but over at 281 exposed we have some more "humor" about the number of employees the district has.  So the claim is that with 2000 district employees why are we seeing such "huge" claims of student enrollment.  Here is what 281 Exposed says:

Now I'm no math genius but does that mean we have six students per employee? OK now before someone comments that not all these employees are teachers, we already know that. But let's say for conversations sake that half of the employees are teachers. That still gives us a 12 to 1 ratio.

So a quick look at the district web site and we had (in 2007-08 - before the big round of cuts) the following:

Teachers * - 856
EA's - 329
Cust/Drivers - 193
Other - 450
Total: 1827

* includes social workers, psychologists, nurses, counselors, occupational therapist

So the first question is, what are the "other number".  This seems like a pretty big number at first but a quick review of the online staff directory shows the following groups missing from these numbers: Administration (33 principals/IA's - 6 cabinet - 30 or so secretaries), Media Services (15 in school + another 5 at central media), Technology (14), Food Service (15 + other cooks - I would guess close to 80 most of which are part time), Print Shop (6), Finance (6), Payroll (3), Testing Services (2), HR (4), Community Ed (30 or so), Communications Department (2) and a bunch more employees who are part-time/seasonal.

So now that we have the answer to the 450 question let's take a peak back at the real question of "doing the math".  In 08-09 we had 59 teachers let go.  So going into last year we had 797 teachers.  So now we are up to 15.6 per teacher.  Then we need to chop off the * who aren't in the classrooms.  We have about 42 people who make up the * above.  So now we have 755 in classroom teachers (16.5).  Now where does the number go from 16.5 to 1 up to the closer 28 to 1 numbers.  There are two places where the numbers skew.  Elementary school (where there are more teachers to keep numbers low - remember the district targets 24 to 1) and special education.  Spec Ed is where the numbers start to float up.  There is currently 13% of students in RAS are special ed.  Now, not all of those numbers fit into this category, but in many special ed. class rooms it is typical to see a teacher to student ratio of 1 to 7 or so.  There are about 135 special ed teachers in the district and again, not all of them are in this same category.  Let's say that 2/3 of them are (or about 88 teachers representing about 616 students).  So now we have 11884 students and 667 teachers or a 17.9 ratio.  Now there are other target areas that require low class sizes including skills reading classes, math skills and a bunch of others that like Spec. Ed could drive up the numbers.

So can I explain for certain where the district comes up with the average class size numbers?  No, I'm sure there is a really pretty and complex formula used for it that my former boss has.  But what we should note is that simply taking a raw number and dividing by the total number of students is a simplistic formula and there is much more to it than that.