For community members interested in knowing more about where their taxpayer dollars are being funneled, seethroughny.net gives spending allocation information on each school district and municipality in New York.

Because of the current economic climate, educational funding and spending has been redefined. With data collected from the Office of the State Comptroller, seethroughny.net provides the opportunity to view schools’ state aid per pupil, total spending per pupil, instruction per pupil and more.

The information is made possible with further calculations by the Public Policy Institute, research affiliate of the Business Council of New York State and the Empire Center for the New York State Policy,superintendents in the Liverpool Central School District and the North Syracuse Central School District have both taken closer looks at the 2010-11 budgets and realize that many things could change over the next few years.

LCSD Superintendent Dr. Richard N. Johns said if the information is provided by the Office of the State Comptroller, then the information is probably as accurate as possible. Since the site’s most current data is from the 2007-08 school year, Johns does not have knowledge of the numbers as he has taken the superintendent’s position less than a year ago.

Asked if the site’s gateway of information is a good thing, Johns said yes.

“I think that’s great, it’s taxpayer money, “he said.

As the site provides municipal information as well, Johns said he, “as a taxpayer, wants to know how money is being spent any time money is spent by government.”

Johns said he believes the more information the district can provide to taxpayers, the better.

“One of my key marks of my administration is transparency,” Johns said.

Having been active in his position long before and during the 2007-08 school year, North Syracuse Central School District Superintendent Dr. Jerome Melvin said he found the data “very interesting.”

An example of the data reported that NSCSD’s spending per pupil was $14,673 matched with the average of $16,882 in Upstate New York for similar districts that contain between 4,501 and 1,000,000 students enrolled. LCSD has a reported $17,772, which comes in at almost $1,000 more than the Upstate average.

“We certainly budget very carefully and in a meaningful way,” Melvin said. “But we can’t avoid the fact that we only have 10 buildings. It’s a plus and a negative.”

Melvin said that the low cost per pupil is “good from a financial perspective, but not when there’s over capacity in certain areas.”

The district does however show fiscal responsibility with taxpayers’ money as indicated by the Web site’s data collection, Melvin said.

The Web site provides such comparisons as state aid per pupil and federal aid per pupil. A ranking designated for districts with population between 4,501 and 1,000,000 students in Central New York ranked Syracuse City School District first as it received $12,657 state aid per pupil.

Liverpool’s $7,373 state aid per pupil third in the ranking, and North Syracuse ranked fifth with $6,097 among seven schools in the category.

Spending data for each school district in the sate is available at the Web site, including village, county and town information as well…

Read article here