Understanding Data
Dictionary of Data Terms
Funding and Resources
Tax and Spending
Tax and Spending data are calculated by the RI Department of Revenue, Division of Property, Valuation and Municipal Finance. These data points were selected to give the public a comparative sense of each district's ability and effort to support public education.
District Property Value per Student: The property value per student is calculated as the total assessed value of all real property in the district divided by the average daily enrollment of public school students living in the district.
District Tax Rate per $1000.00: Established by local governments, this is a dollar rate per $1,000 of property value on owner-occupied residential properties in the district. The information on tax rates is for owner-occupied residential property. Thus, a $10.00 tax rate on a $500,000 house will raise $5,000 in tax revenue. A house valued at $250,000 will raise only half that amount, or $2,500. A poorer community, whose houses have an average value of $250,000, would have to raise its tax rate to $20.00 per $1,000 in order to generate $5,000.
Except in the wealthiest communities in the state, homestead-exemption plans and classified tax rates have been used to moderate the tax burden on owner-occupied houses so that tax rates on owner-occupied houses in the poorer urban communities are not significantly higher (and may be lower) than tax rates in suburban communities. The urban communities also may tax commercial property at higher rates than the owner-occupied residential property rate.
District Per Pupil Expenditure: The average dollar amount that the district spends for each public school student living in the district.
Jamestown and Little Compton send all high-school students out of district on a tuition basis. The high-school students in these two districts are counted as part of the total number of pupils in determining the per-pupil expenditures.
Median Family Income: From the 2000 Census, median family income provides more contextual data about the wealth of each municipality.
Considered together, property value, tax rate, and per pupil expenditure indicate each district's ability to generate revenue to support its schools and other municipal services. You will notice the inequities among the 36 districts resulting from the value of their property. Municipal salaries, such as those of teachers, cost roughly the same from community to community, so poor communities must tax their citizens at higher rates to generate the same amount of revenue as wealthier communities. (Note that this tax burden in the urban districts falls on owners of commercial property as well as on owner-occupied residential property.)
The district property tax capacity and tax effort data described below indicate how much a municipality can or could tax its local properties compared with how much it does tax the local properties.
District Property Tax Capacity: This is the amount of taxable property wealth available to a community on a per capita basis. For purposes here among regional schools districts, (for example, Chariho - Charlestown, Richmond and Hopkinton) the capacities of each municipality have been aggregated to a district capacity. The tax capacity of each district was then divided by the statewide capacity and multiplied by 100.
District Tax Effort: This figure indicates the extent to which a district is taxed in relation to the rest of the state. The property tax of a district is divided by the state average and multiplied by 100.
Funding and Resources
The Uniform Chart of Accounts (UCOA)
UCOA is a fiscal reporting system that allows every school and district to post their detailed financial information using exactly the same methods and account. This standardization allows the public to make apples-to-apples comparisons of income and expenditures across schools and districts, and compared with state averages.
A note on InfoWorks data reporting: To ensure confidentiality, data are not reported for groups with fewer than 10 students, so that no individual student is identifiable. Where this is the case, InfoWorks reports "too few data." Also, "no data" is used to point out instances where data are not available for a particular state, district, or school indicator.