School Staff per 1k Students
The number of full-time-equivalent staff a school district employs for every 1,000 students enrolled.
Both inputs come from the Common Core of Data, the annual NCES collection covering "all public elementary and secondary schools and school districts" (About CCD). Its nonfiscal component reports "Staff FTE counts by professional category" for districts alongside student membership (CCD data files). This measure combines the two district-wide staff totals the collection publishes — staff attached to the district itself, and staff based in its schools.
The staff counted are broad. The Department instructs states to "include all teachers and non-instructional staff in LEAs and schools filled by direct hire or by contracting", and to "exclude all vacant positions" (EDFacts staff file specification). That covers teachers, paraprofessionals, counselors, librarians, principals and their support staff, student support services staff, and other support staff such as maintenance, security, transport and food service workers. Counts are full-time equivalents, so two half-time employees count as one.
Metrics in this family#
School staff per 1,000 students
levelTotal district staff per 1,000 students enrolled, in the district's most recent reported school year, 2024-25.
Considerations#
This is an input measure, not an outcome measure. It counts how many adults a district employs relative to its enrollment, and it does not distinguish an additional teacher from an additional bus driver. Districts also differ in how much they contract out: a district that outsources transport, cleaning or food service reports fewer staff than an otherwise identical district that employs them directly, even though the service is the same. Rural districts covering long distances often need more transport staff for the same enrollment.
Because the categories rolled together here are broad, the measure is best read as a coarse staffing-intensity indicator rather than a precise comparison between two districts.
Staff counts are reported by states to the Department, and NCES notes that not all states are able to report every staff category. Where a category is not reported, the district's total is lower than its actual staffing rather than missing, so under-reporting states can look thinly staffed.
The figure is district-wide and says nothing about how staff are distributed between schools. Only two school years are loaded, 2023-24 and 2024-25.
This is a district-level figure displayed on a census tract. It describes the district covering that tract, not the tract. It covers public schools only; private and home-schooled enrollment is outside the collection.
References#
- 1About CCDhttps://nces.ed.gov/ccd/aboutccd.asp
- 2CCD data fileshttps://nces.ed.gov/ccd/files.asp
- 3EDFacts staff file specificationhttps://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/edfacts/eden/non-xml/fs059-15-1.docx