Revenues and Expenditures by Public School Districts: School Year 2004-05

This report presents data from the School District Finance Survey for School Year 2004-05 (fiscal year 2005, or FY05). The School District Finance Survey is a district-level survey that consists of data submitted annually to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) by state education agencies (SEAs) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. All financial transactions associated with assets, expenditures, revenues, and indebtedness are accounted for, including revenues from federal, state, and local sources and expenditures in categories such as instruction and instruction-related activities, student support services, administration, operation, capital outlay, and debt services.  

The School District Finance survey is part of the Common Core of Data (CCD) surveys that collect administrative records data from SEAs.  The data are collected and edited by the U.S. Census Bureau for NCES.  All 50 states and the District of Columbia provided data for FY05. 

A variety of types of local education agencies are reported in the School District Finance Survey.  While agencies whose only function is to collect and allocate funds or to provide certain administrative services for a group of districts are also included on the file, only regular public school districts and charter school districts are covered in this report. 1 

For tables 1 through 6 in this report, all regular school districts that have student counts greater than zero and that are listed in the CCD Local Education Agency Universe Survey file for school year 2004–05 were included in the analyses. There were 15,287 such districts in FY05. National figures do not include independent charter school districts; however, charter schools affiliated with regular school districts are included in the national and state figures.  

Table 7 presents the revenues and current expenditures of the 100 largest school districts according to the size of their student enrollment, using data from the School District Finance Survey. 

The federal revenues table (table 8) includes all local education agencies reported in the School District Finance Survey. 

Please see Appendix A: Methodology and Technical Notes for more information about survey content and methodology. Appendix B is a glossary of key CCD terms used in this report.  

More information about CCD surveys and products is available at http://nces.ed.gov/ccd.