Taxpayers have a new online resource to find out how much money school districts in New York state are spending.

On Monday, the Empire Center for Public Policy added to its Web site, www.SeeThroughNY.net, a searchable database of school district spending during the 2007-08 school year. The site includes data from 700 school districts statewide, excluding those in New York City.

Web site browsers can search for benchmark comparisons between different districts, rank them by category and find myriad other figures related to school spending.

“What we’re trying to achieve is that this information should be easily accessible to the public,” said Lise Bang-Jensen, senior policy analyst at the Empire Center for Public Policy.

Bang-Jensen said figures on superintendent and teacher contracts, per pupil spending and transportation costs, haven’t previously been made easily accessible to taxpayers. Ordinarily, they’d have to file their own Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests to obtain that information.

The data was acquired by the Empire Center through numerous FOIL requests to the New York State Comptroller’s Office, to which school districts report figures. Bang-Jensen warned that some inaccuracies may have been reported by school districts, so a slight margin of error should be taken into account.

The benchmarking project was developed by the Empire Center for Public Policy and The Business Council’s Public Policy Institute.

“Benchmarking is a catalyst for shaping public policy,” Bang-Jensen said. “It helps (taxpayers) ask the right questions about why we’re spending so much or so little in certain areas — there may be perfectly reasonable explanations, but no one has the information to ask these questions.”

She added that benchmarking is not only helpful to taxpayers and citizens, but can be useful to school districts themselves as a comparison method.

For example, benchmark comparisons of Saratoga Springs City School District, Ballston Spa Central School District and Schuylerville Central School District reveal that spending per pupil is similar across the board, even though the districts vary in size…

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