The Cranky Taxpayer

I am editing this page on March 4, 2007, which is the 247th day of the fiscal year. I am using the 2004-05 data because the 2005-06 data still have not been posted to the Education Department Web site.

From a Freedom of Information Act request last week, I learned that

The Department has not reported the reasons for this testudinal activity to the Board
The Department has not reported the reasons for this testudinal activity to the Superintendent
The Department has not even drafted a report explaining why the data are so late.

Your tax dollars at "work."

The data for Richmond show a lot of disorderly conduct and a large lot of "other" offenses:

The Average Daily Membership for the Fall that year was 25,054. A little arithmetic shows that Richmond's 22,487 reports amount to 0.90 incident per kid. These data suggest that we have a lot of disorderly kids, or a lot of kids who repeat their disorderly conduct, or (Lord, help us!) both.

The disorderly conduct and "other" offenses dominate the picture. Taking those out of the graph gives a better picture of the remaining incidents:

Aside from the simple disorder, please notice the 85 instances of weapons, 105 sexual offenses, 29 fighting with injuries, 105 drugs, 1045 battery against student, and 241 battery against staff and 17 arson(!) reports.

To see where we stack up against other divisions, here is the list of divisions with more than 0.5 reports per kid:

Division Name	Fall 04 ADM	Incidents per ADM
Covington City	841	2.39
Brunswick County	2322	1.64
Buckingham County	2244	1.52
Mecklenburg County	4931	1.47
Richmond City	25054	0.90
Greensville County	2647	0.84
Prince George County	6236	0.77
Danville City	7312	0.73
Caroline County	3928	0.70
Grayson County	2211	0.63
Hampton City	22938	0.63
Suffolk City	13722	0.62
Northumberland County	1477	0.59
Sussex County	1348	0.58
Hopewell City	3908	0.52
Northampton County	1999	0.52
Essex County	1612	0.52
Amelia County	1761	0.51
Henry County	7815	0.51

In terms of a graph, here are the statewide data (Richmond is the gold square; Norfolk is the red diamond):

Some of these data may be funky: Petersburg, for example, has the worst school division in Virginia; their 16% report strongly suggests that they are cooking the numbers.

These data tell us that we have a remarkable amount of disorder in our schools. They don't tell us what we are doing (or not doing) about it. Other data show we are rewarding the violent kids by letting them not come to school. One reason for our dysfunctional response is dysfunctional leadership.