School Administration

How much of Suffield’s school district is administrators rather than teachers, how much of its budget administration takes, and how much of both is simply the district’s size.

  • AUDITED FY 2013-14 → FY 2022-23
  • PULLED 2026-08-10
Enrollment 1,990 Average daily membership, FY 2022-23. CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf).
Education spending $43.3M Audited actual, FY 2022-23. A town in a regional district reports only the grades it runs. CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf).
Education spending per pupil $21,739RANK 66 / 169 4% below the statewide median of $22,590 Audited actual ÷ average daily membership, FY 2022-23. CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf). OPM education expenditures divided by average daily membership. This is not the state Department of Education's Net Current Expenditures Per Pupil, which is calculated on a narrower basis and will differ.
Before you read these charts.
  • How much of a district is administration — The state's administrator count bundles coordinators and department chairs with principals and the superintendent's office, a small district needs a superintendent as much as a large one does, and the headcount share and the spending share do not give the same answer.
  • Reported school staffing — Staffing figures are positions each district reports to the state under fixed assignment categories. They count reported roles, not workload, and a category boundary can move a person between lines without anyone changing jobs.
  • Peer groups — A peer group is a tool for a specific question, not a verdict. A group that is right for comparing school spending can be wrong for comparing snow plowing. Where two defensible groups disagree, this site shows both.
  • Per-pupil spending — There is more than one per-pupil number, and they are not interchangeable. What this site derives from OPM spending and average daily membership is not the state Department of Education's Net Current Expenditures Per Pupil.
  • Medians, and why the town is left out of its own — A group is summarized by its median — the middle town, not the average. The subject town is excluded from its own group median, because a town cannot be part of the benchmark it is measured against.
  • Audited actuals — Audited actuals are what a town actually spent and received across all its governmental funds, as reported after the year closed. They are not the budget the town adopted.

8 terms bear on this page; the 6 most used are above. Full definitions, what each measure does not support, and the source behind it: How these numbers work.

Read this before the first chart. “Too many administrators” is one of the most common things said about a school budget, and four facts shape every number on this page.
  • The state’s administrator count is wider than the word suggests. Its two categories are “Administrators, Coordinators and Department Chairs — District Central Office” and “… — School Level”. A department chair who teaches most of the day is counted here, next to the superintendent and the principals. The state publishes no narrower count, so neither does this page.
  • These figures belong to a district, not to a town. The district or districts that teach this town’s children are named once the data loads. A regional district’s administrators serve every member town alike, and no arithmetic on this page splits them between member towns.
  • One superintendent is a fixed cost. A district of 400 students and one of 4,000 each need one. Smaller districts therefore sit higher on every administration share before any decision is taken, which is why the fourth chart below sets this district’s share against every Connecticut district’s enrollment instead of leaving size as an argument.
  • Positions and dollars are different questions. A district with fewer, better-paid administrators can spend more on administration than one with more of them. Both are on this page, on their own year bases, and where they disagree the page says so rather than choosing one.
What is not here: pay. Connecticut publishes no administrator or teacher salary figures by district. Nothing on this page is a salary, and no salary is estimated in place of one.

01 How much of this district is administration?

At a glance

How much of this district is administrators, how much of its budget administration takes, and how much of both is simply its size. Every figure below is a count of positions or a share of spending, from the state’s own uniform collections, for the district that employs the staff.

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    Source: CT State Department of Education, EdSight FTE Staffing report and enrollment dashboard (October 1 collection, by school year), and the Education Financial System per-pupil expenditures by function (by fiscal year), joined with the town-to-district map in ct_town_school_districts.json by Data/build_administration.py into administration.json. Each tile names the year its own figure comes from. Rank and median beneath a tile are across every Connecticut district with a published figure that year; a tile is flagged only when it sits in the lowest or highest tenth, and a position is not a grade.

    02 What share of the district’s staff are administrators?

    Administrators as a Share of All Reported Staff

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    Source: EdSight FTE Staffing report via administration.json (staffing.groups.admin_central + admin_school, divided by every reported group). Full-time equivalent positions on an October 1 school-year basis. Grouping the state’s twelve assignment categories is this site’s editorial decision; the payload carries the exact source categories behind every group, and the insight box below names the ones in the numerator. A category with no row in a year is a gap in the source, so a year’s share is of the categories that year reports and is not adjusted for the ones it does not.

    03 Where do those positions sit?

    Administrator Positions: Central Office and School Level

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    Source: EdSight FTE Staffing report via administration.json (staffing.groups.admin_central and admin_school, the state’s categories carried separately). A one-year step in either bar can be a staffing change or a change in how a position was classified that year; the source offers no way to tell the two apart, and the insight box names any step large enough to be worth that caution.

    04 How many students are there for each administrator?

    Students per Administrator and Students per Teacher

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    Source: EdSight via administration.json — numerator staffing.enrollment (the October 1 headcount, not the average membership the OPM finance files use); denominators the administrator categories and the two teacher categories, for the same district and the same school year. The two lines are on different scales of the same axis and are not comparable to each other in level; what each shows is its own movement.

    05 How much of this is simply district size?

    Administrator Share Against District Size, Every Connecticut District

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    Source: both axes from EdSight via administration.json, same district and same school year on each point — vertical, the administrator share described above; horizontal, staffing.enrollment. The fit is a description of these points and not a prediction for any district. The box below also gives the size question without a model, as the observed median share in each quarter of districts by enrollment, so a reader is not asked to take a fitted slope on trust. The statewide version of this chart, with every district ranked, is on the administration ranking page.

    06 How does that share compare with the peer districts?

    Administrator Share of Staff, This District and Its Peer Districts

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    Source: EdSight FTE Staffing report via administration.json, most recent school year the district reports. Peer towns come from this town’s own comparison groups; each is mapped to the district that operates its schools, so a regional district serving several peer towns is one bar, not several. Districts with no reported staffing that year are omitted rather than charted at zero, and the insight box names them.

    07 How much of the district’s spending goes to administration?

    Administration as a Share of What the District Spends

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    Source: CT State Department of Education, Education Financial System, Per Pupil Expenditures by Function (District), via administration.json (spending.general_admin + school_admin ÷ spending.total). The functions are defined identically for every district by the state’s chart of accounts; how a district organises and staffs those offices is not. The peer medians are the median across the peer districts’ own shares, excluding this district. This series covers fewer years than the staffing charts above, and starts later; each chart shows the years its own source publishes.

    08 How do those administration dollars compare per pupil?

    Administration Spending per Pupil, This District and Its Peer Districts

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    Source: EdSight Education Financial System via administration.json (spending.general_admin and school_admin, each divided by spending.pupils, the pupil count the same file reports for the same district and year). The pupil basis is the state’s for this report and is not the October 1 headcount used by the staffing charts above, so a per-pupil figure here and a per-student ratio there rest on different denominators and are not two versions of one number.

    What this page cannot tell you: pay

    Everything above counts positions or dollars by function. None of it is a salary. Connecticut’s education data portal publishes staffing levels, vacancies, attrition, diversity and preparation — and no compensation figures of any kind, for any district.

    That gap is being closed from the records side rather than guessed at. Under Conn. Gen. Stat. § 10-153d(b) every board of education must file a signed copy of each teacher and administrator contract with the town clerk and with the Commissioner of Education, so the negotiated salary schedules for nearly every district in the state sit together at the State Department of Education. Superintendent contracts are not bargaining-unit agreements and are not filed there; each is a separate request to its own board of education.

    Until those schedules are in hand this page carries no pay figure at all, rather than an estimate standing in for one. A district with fewer, better-paid administrators can spend more on administration than a district with more of them, and nothing here can currently tell those two apart.

    The data behind these charts

    Suffield’s own series behind the charts on this page, as text. Each table names the dataset it came from and the year of every row. The peer towns and group medians the charts also plot are not repeated here; they are in the same source files, linked in the footer.

    Who Suffield is compared with

    Surrounding towns 4 towns

    East Granby · Enfield · Granby · Windsor Locks

    The towns that share a border or an immediate labor market. Right for regional context; they are not matched on size or wealth.

    District Reference Group C 32 towns

    Andover · Barkhamsted · Bethany · Bethlehem · Bolton · Bridgewater · Burlington · Canton · Columbia · Cornwall · Durham · Ellington · Essex · Haddam · Harwinton · Hebron · Killingworth · Lyme · Mansfield · Marlborough · Middlefield · New Hartford · Old Lyme · Oxford · Pomfret · Roxbury · Salem · Sherman · Somers · Tolland · Washington · Woodbury

    The CT State Department of Education grouping of school districts on family income, parent education, family structure and enrollment. Last assigned in 2006, and built for education questions rather than town-side spending.

    Municipal peers 12 towns

    Rocky Hill · East Lyme · East Hampton · Berlin · North Branford · Haddam · Newington · Somers · Oxford · New Milford · Southbury · North Haven

    Town-side spending, debt, reserves, and tax comparisons. Chosen by a published formula over state data rather than by hand: the nearest towns by standardized distance on the stated variables.

    School peers 12 towns

    Windsor Locks · Rocky Hill · Coventry · East Lyme · Watertown · North Branford · East Hampton · Berlin · Killingly · Somers · Seymour · Prospect

    Education spending comparisons. Chosen by a published formula over state data rather than by hand: the nearest towns by standardized distance on the stated variables.

    Suffield is left out of each list above, because a town is never part of the benchmark it is measured against. Group medians elsewhere on the site exclude it the same way. Sources: surrounding towns and District Reference Group are the published groupings; the peer sets are built by a stated formula over CT OPM data (Data/build_peer_sets.py), not selected by hand.

    Education spending and enrollment by fiscal year

    Education spending and enrollment by fiscal year for Suffield, Connecticut
    Fiscal year Enrollment (average daily membership) Education expenditures Per pupil Share of total spending
    FY 2013-142,314$35,732,506$15,44169.0%
    FY 2014-152,278$35,848,599$15,73466.6%
    FY 2015-162,261$37,292,260$16,49367.9%
    FY 2016-172,202$39,426,355$17,90868.7%
    FY 2017-182,135$39,968,226$18,71768.8%
    FY 2018-192,075$41,380,658$19,94068.9%
    FY 2019-202,033$41,888,403$20,60469.2%
    FY 2020-211,984$41,962,956$21,14968.0%
    FY 2021-221,999$42,518,289$21,27169.0%
    FY 2022-231,990$43,258,751$21,73969.2%

    Per pupil here is OPM education expenditures divided by average daily membership. It is not the CT State Department of Education's Net Current Expenditures Per Pupil, which uses a narrower definition of spending and will differ. A town in a regional district reports only the grades it runs. Source: CT OPM, Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf) - audited actuals as filed by each town.

    Where Suffield sits among all 169 Connecticut towns, FY 2022-23

    Where Suffield sits among all 169 Connecticut towns, FY 2022-23 for Suffield, Connecticut
    Measure Suffield Rank, lowest to highest Statewide median
    Total expenditures per resident$3,99763 of 169$4,217
    Education expenditures per pupil$21,73966 of 169$22,590
    Equalized mill rate15.68 mills59 of 16917.18 mills
    Equalized net grand list per resident$182,25173 of 169$189,668
    Total fund balance as a share of total expenditures16.4%52 of 16919.9%
    Bonded long-term debt per resident$1,23956 of 169$1,741
    Intergovernmental revenue as a share of total revenues29.0%130 of 16920.5%

    A rank is a position, not a grade. Which end of the list is preferable depends on the measure and on what a reader is trying to find out. Per-pupil spending here is OPM education expenditures divided by average daily membership, which is not the state Department of Education's Net Current Expenditures Per Pupil. Source: CT OPM, Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf) - audited actuals as filed by each town. Ranks computed for FY 2022-23 across all 169 towns.