← All statewide rankings
Read this before ranking towns: this is a derived figure — each town's education expenditures divided by its average enrollment, both from the state's audited municipal indicators. It is not the state's official Net Current Expenditures per Pupil (NCEP), which follows its own statutory formula and is not published as machine-readable statewide data. The two move together but are not interchangeable. Special-education intensity, grade mix, regional-district membership and school size drive much of the spread — a high figure is not proof of inefficiency, and a low one is not proof of thrift. This page uses the audited year —, older than the adopted-budget pages, because enrollment and spending must come from the same year.
Education spending per student — all 169 towns
Audited education expenditures divided by average enrollment (ADM), —. Sorted lowest to highest; rank 1 is the lowest figure, which describes the amount, not the schools.
first quarter of the ranking
second quarter
third quarter
fourth quarter
your picked town
Loading…
Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf), fields education_expenditures and school_enrollment_average, via ct_ucoa_town_indicators.json. Derived measure; not NCEP.
The full table
All towns with the per-student figure, enrollment and total education spending.
Loading…
How this ranking is made
Per student = audited education expenditures ÷ average daily membership (ADM), both for the same town and fiscal year from the same OPM file. ADM is a year-average count of resident students the town is responsible for, wherever they attend; October-1 headcounts differ from it.
- Regional school districts: a member town's education expenditure is dominated by its assessment payment to the district. The figure remains a real cost per resident student, but two members of one district can show different per-student figures because assessment formulas weigh more than enrollment.
- Small denominators: in the smallest towns a handful of high-cost placements moves the figure by hundreds of dollars. Year-to-year jumps in small towns are usually that, not policy.
- Scale: very small schools lose economies of scale; some of the highest figures belong to towns running a tiny school rather than towns paying generously.
- Grant-funded spending is not all here. The expenditure figure is the town's own reported education spending; money spent through separate grant funds — largest in the cities that receive the biggest state and federal education grants — can sit outside it. The lowest figures on this chart belong mostly to those cities, and they understate what is actually spent in their classrooms. The state's official NCEP measure counts that spending; this derived figure cannot.
Why not the adopted budget used on the spending page? There is no adopted-year enrollment to divide by; pairing a current budget with enrollment from two years earlier would quietly shift every shrinking district's figure upward. Same-year audited pairs avoid that distortion.
More rankings: education spending vs. income · spending per resident · tax rates