John Branston of Memphis Flyer suggests that there is math homework that Memphis City Council needs to attend to before giving Memphis City Schools any more money.
He writes:
Call it “The Case of the Missing 7,000 Students.” But you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure this one out. The Tennessee Court of Appeals make a shopper of an error in its decision this week on the funding for Memphis City Schools. If you do the math, it comes out to $75 million in schools expenses and that’s an amount that should get members of Memphis City Council doing some homework before raising anyone’s taxes or forking over millions of dollars to MCS.
On the second page of its ruling, the court says MCS “serves approximately 112,000 students.” No, it does not. According to MCS, the system serves “about 105,000” students. The Tennessee Report Card says the actual number is 104,829 students. School funding is determined by enrollment. The per-pupil funding (from all sources) for MCS is $10,394. Multiply that by 7,171 — the difference between the actual enrollment and the number the appeals court wrongly assumes to be accurate — and the result is approximately $75 million.
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