At a February candidates forum for school board candidates, Gaylaird Christopher, a local architect who unsuccessfully challenged  incumbent Tom Selinske in the March 8 board election, held up two charts, one with the API test scores of local school districts, and one purporting to be the spending per pupil for those districts.

The spending per pupil graph showed PUSD with much higher spending compared to several other neighboring districts, some of which are wealthier than Pasadena. 

Christopher said his point was that PUSD spends too much for the results that it gets, and the community should expect better.

In response, Peter Dreier, an Occidental College politics professor in the audience, interrupted him and disputed Christopher's statements.

So were the numbers correct?  Christopher attributed the figures to the state Department of Education. Patch took a look at those figures and indeed they show Pasadena as having high expenditures compared to the rest of the county.

The figures track expenditures per average daily attendee (ADA), and put Pasadena at $10,583 per ADA compared to $8,990 for the county average.  Out of 80 school districts in the county, Pasadena is the fifth highest in these costs.

So we emailed Dreier to ask him why he said what he did. His response:

"Christopher was comparing apples and oranges when looking at per-capita student spending in PUSD and other districts. Pasadena has a much, much larger number of low-income students, and thus more students for whom the district spends money on free-and-reduce lunch subsidies, transportation to and from school, and special needs. If you compare per-student spending in terms of what is spent on education - ie in the classroom -- you don't get those disparities."

Other Department of Education numbers support this statement: Pasadena's average teacher salary, for example, is below the county average, and well below the wealthier districts in the county.

The district also clearly has more low-income students than the average district in the county and far more than a lot of neighboring cities; 60 percent of PUSD students receive a free or reduced-cost lunch.  By comparison, neighboring La Canada Flintridge has fewer than 1 percent of their students participating in that program.

At the same time, the figures don't definitively attribute the extra spending to low income programs.  They are not broken down by cost on social programs versus other administrative programs or other categories, so there is still some guesswork involved in the figures.

The Department of Education numbers below for the 2008-09 school year compare PUSD to some of its wealthy neighbors and also Glendale (which is much closer to PUSD in terms of the financial make-up of its students).  The first graph shows expenditures per ADA, the second, average teacher salary, and the third, the percent of students needing a free or reduced cost lunch.