Local School Finance Study, 2018

For more than 25 years, the Public School Forum of North Carolina has isolated local spending from state and federal spending to examine the capacity and actual effort of counties to support public schools. The annual Local School Finance Study examines not only on the amount that counties spend on schools, but also each county's investment in the context of that county's taxable resources. The 2018 Local School Finance Study examines data from the 2015-16 school year. The primary source of financial information is the Division of School Business at the Department of Public Instruction, which provided data on non-property tax revenue; low-wealth and small county supplemental funding information; final average daily membership (except for charter school enrollments); effective county tax rate; adjusted revenue tax base; and current expenses. Other sources include the North Carolina Department of Revenue's "County Property Tax Rates and Revaluation Schedules" and "Sales Assessment Ratio Studies," which provided the 2015-16 property tax valuations and tax rates; the Department of Revenue's data on Local Government Sales and Use Tax Distribution; and the North Carolina Department of State Treasurer's "Report on County Spending on Public School Capital Outlays." The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services provided data for the mandated social services expenditures, and the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts provided data on fines and forfeitures. Per capita income was obtained through the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis. In 2015-16, the state's ten counties that spent the most per student averaged $3,103 per student as compared with the ten that spent the least, which averaged $739 per student. That represents a gap of $2,364--and 60 counties are below the state average of $1,596. [For the 2017 report, see ED585763.]