Homeschoolers, what could you do with this much money?

Question

I just read that public schools spend $10,000 + per student each year. That is all tax dollars. It blows my mind that with all that cash, highly trained professionals and all the "well socialized" students they have to work with American schools still rank between 24th and 38th (depending on the subject) in the world.

Who wants to bet me $5 somebody answers blaming the parents?

Answer 1

That cost varies from state to state, but even so it is always an extravagant amount.

That amount would more than pay for my two students curriculum materials, extra curricular activities, field trips and miscellaneous other expenses.  It would also pay the expenses for our "school", i.e. electricity.

In addition to what is listed above, I could purchase each child a personal computer, as well as the digital projector I would love to have-and STILL have money left over.  Those items would last for years, as well, so they would not have to be replenished each year.  

With what was left over, I would save for their college-which does not cost much more than the public schools spend on compulsory education.  Wow.

I thought doing things in bulk was supposed to be less costly-but that is not the case for public school, obviously.

Answer 2

I asked my kids.  My 4th grader said he would spend it on schools in Iraq. My second grader would buy supplies for those schools.

I figured you needed at least one answer from the students.

Answer 3

Our state averages 10-12,000 per student, each school district is different.  Right now we are in a battle to stop Rep. Karen Byer from pushing thru a bill to try and stop charter schools from collecting the 70-85% of that, per student going to cyber school.  

I'd like to know what the school district is doing for my child with the 15-30% they are keeping when my child doesnt even attend the school?!?

Yet Byer (with much support from the teachers union and school districts--no surprise) says that the cyber schools are not being accountable for what they spend( a total lie), and they dont NEED all that money since they are not a "brick and mortar school".  Well then why does the district NEED to keep it???

It fries me that I have sent my girls to private school, with my own money, for a better education, while the district still gets paid for educating my kids that they havent seen for six years!

I could think of LOADS of things to do with that money!

Answer 4

I find it funny that public school advocates still claim the schools are underfunded.  ;-)

Answer 5

If we had $10,000, I would be in some sort of program that would send me to Germany so I could intern at a place with a particle accelerator.

That money is guaranteed to come through, and the students are forcibly made to attend government schools, so the bureaucracy has no reason to make the schools efficient.

If anything, they have reasons not to. The system is designed to fail our kids, and the worse they fail, the more money they get with no obligations.

Let's say you buy a $500 computer from Acmecorp. This Acmecorp computer crashes and erases all your data. You call their tech support and they show up to fix your machine. They're incredibly inefficient and unhelpful, and keep s******g up your computer. To add insult to injury, after they break a stick of your RAM in half and knock over a potted plant, they demand more and more money to be able to fix it. I imagine you'd ditch them pretty fast.

That is exactly what government schools are doing, but unlike Acmecorp, the government has authorized itself to use force so we're all basically screwed.

No parent would pay $10,000 a year to send their kid to my local school. $10,000 to be dealt hard drugs, assaulted, impregnated in the hallways, constantly policed by cameras and security guards...it's like charging rent at a concentration camp.

Look beyond all that: if that ten grand wasn't being stolen from the people who are _against_ homeschooling, they could be sending their kids to good private schools.

Everyone benefits when they keep all their money.

Answer 6

If I had to spend it all on homeschool-related expenses (anything from textbooks, to co-op classes), I could do a lot.  However, if I had to use it the way the public school do, it wouldn't cover much.  Public school have LOTS of administrative costs (not just for the teachers, principals, and superintendents, but janitors, building maintenance, lunch ladies, ...)  plus capital expenses (land, buildings, electric, water, ...) and office supplies/machinery (copier, laminating machine, paper, ...).  Oh, and of course, the books.  So if I had to use the money to pay for part of my mortgage, electric bill, hire a cook and cleaning person, ... you get the idea.

Now, if you want to know how the US can spend that much per student and still rank so low on test scores, that's an entirely different question.

Part of the reason the US scores so poorly when compared to other nations has to do with immigration.  If you think about it, most immigrants are coming from very poor nations, many without a "public" school system, so, in addition to not knowing the English language, these kids don't know the basics of math, grammar, etc. but they're still tested.  If you compare "middle America" (very heterogeneous, low-immigrant districts, like Ames, Iowa or Tulsa, Oklahoma) to other nations, the US generally ranks in the top two or three.

The other part has to do with the way our public school system operates.  No other country tries to educate their ENTIRE population to the level of high school graduate.  In other countries, by the time a student is 12 or 13, he or she has been separated into either vocational training or a college-prep track (guess which set of students has test scores that can be reported?)

I'm not sure what parents have to do with how much money school districts spend per student, so I'm not sure why you added that last note.  Maybe you're thinking that someone will respond that the reason US test scores are so low has to do with parents not being involved in their child's education.  First, this would be off topic of the original question ("what could you do with this much money?").  Second, do you not know that test scores are generally positively correlated to parental involvement with the child's education (high involvement generally equals high scores)?

Answer 7

The $10,000 dollars per student doesn't go to the classroom.  It goes to pay for bureaucracy that decides what can and cannot be taught, the transportation (school buses), the maintenance of the school building and grounds, free lunches... etc. etc. etc.

If I had $10,000 a year to spend per student on my homeschool, that would $30,000 per year total,  we would be able to afford a much better curriculum!  I think first I'd build an extra room to hold everything, then I'd start taking a lot more field trips... art museums, science centers, the grand canyon, etc.  We would also get lots of lab equipment for science.  With whatever was left each year I would save for college.

Answer 8

As we know money is the answer to everything, not.

$10 to 14K per student in a classroom with an average of 25 students, let's see that equates to about $350.000 per year per classroom.

Deduct some for the overpriced textbooks, and materials; we spend about $150.00 per year per child max,  and allow for a teacher's salary, depending on where you are somewhere between $35.000 to $50.000 per year, and I believe that leaves a handsome sum for the schools/school district to cover any cost, and then some.

Underfunded I think not, but when will enough ever be enough?

What could we do with that much money, I'd think of something that would actually net me a return for the $$ invested.

Quote;

Education seems to be in America the only commodity of which the customer tries to get as little he can for his money.

Max Forman

Answer 9

I think they need that much money to pay for free school lunches, therapists for "behaviorally challenged" students, and an average of 20,000 pencils

Answer 10

10,000 times 30 kids times again by 100 class rooms! Man that's more money than I want to be responsible for. Still we have poor education. They still have poorly stocked and out of date labs. They still have computers that makes the apple 2e seem up to date (and they teach computer lit on them). They still can't protect the safety of our kids. They still can't stop the drug deals. They still can't teach them what the real world is like. Should I keep going...

By the way it's all the parents fault!!! LOL

Answer 11

i blame the parents...

lol just kidding haha i crack myself up.

sorry that really wasnt funny.

Answer 12

Glee,

Some schools (NJ) spend upwards of $14,000 per student per year.

Very little of that money finds its way into the classroom.

What blows my mind is that figure compares to the cost of attending some pretty decent colleges for a year.

With $10k a year, we could:

- Have an awesome library

- Take at least one really cool field trip every year (and not have to do a fundraiser in order to go)

- Have our own private lab (probably in the garage) for biology, chemistry, physics and such (picture Dexter's lab).

- Hire a maid. :-)

Notice I said "could."

What we would do with it is save about $8,000 of that every year to pay for college and maybe even the down payment on my son's first home.

Even having $2,000 a year would be pretty sweet and we could make that go a long way.

***UPDATE: For those that have or will homeschool from the beginning to the end...

If you were to save that $10K per year for 12 years and get a compounded 6% interest rate (which is low historically) by the time your child finished 12th grade you would have around $200,000.

So... what could you or you child do with $200k?