Who spends what on schools? Bristol Warren near the bottom

Taxpayers in Bristol and Warren send less money to schools than those in most Rhode Island school districts

By Scott Pickering
Posted 3/18/21

Bristol and Warren taxpayers have never been big spenders when it comes to public education — not when compared to other Rhode Island communities.

In the nearly 30 years since the Bristol …

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Who spends what on schools? Bristol Warren near the bottom

Taxpayers in Bristol and Warren send less money to schools than those in most Rhode Island school districts

Posted

Bristol and Warren taxpayers have never been big spenders when it comes to public education — not when compared to other Rhode Island communities.

In the nearly 30 years since the Bristol Warren Regional School District was created, Bristol and Warren funding for the public schools — meaning tax dollars used for public education — has been among the lowest in the state. The Bristol Warren school district is consistently in the bottom third for local funding of Rhode Island school districts.

There are obvious reasons for this. In the beginning, back in the early 1990s, the State of Rhode Island made “regionalization” very enticing. Merge school districts and you could tap into additional state funding, commonly known as the “regionalization bonus.”

Bristol and Warren taxpayers rode the wave of that regionalization bonus for two decades, enjoying far more state funding for their schools than they would have received if they were their own, separate suburban districts. As a result, the local taxpayers never had to pay as much as their neighbors in Barrington or Portsmouth to fund a comparable school system.

But the party started to end in 2010. That’s when the state adopted a new funding formula for education — an objective, cold-hearted measurement of a district’s student body and its socioeconomic profile, with no consideration of which legislator could pull the most strings, plus the beginning of the end for the “regionalization bonus.”

The extra state cash for regional schools district would be phased out, year by year, beginning in 2012. That phaseout has been impacting the Bristol Warren district ever since, though most significantly in the past five years or so.

CLICK TO SEE WHERE BRISTOL-WARREN RANKED IN 2010

CLICK TO SEE WHERE BRISTOL-WARREN RANKED IN 2015

CLICK TO SEE WHERE BRISTOL-WARREN RANKED IN 2019

Despite the steady erosion of its state funding, the Bristol Warren district has never changed its ranking for local funding of public education. An examination of per-pupil local funding shows Bristol Warren was 26th out of 35 districts in 2010, when local taxpayers spent $8,589 per student.

By 2015, that figure had climbed to $10,420 per student, but Bristol Warren was only 25th in the state.

And in 2019 (the last year for which all data is readily available), Bristol and Warren taxpayers were spending $11,869 per student, which was 24th in the state rankings.

So over the course of a decade, despite a precipitous decline in proportionate state funding, Bristol and Warren taxpayers remain among the bottom-third of Rhode Island communities in terms of local funding for education.

It’s noteworthy that the Bristol Warren ranking remained very consistent during that 10-year span, despite a shrinking enrollment. The student body shrank 9% (from 3,574 students to 3,232 students) during that time. If all else had stayed constant, the district’s per-pupil spending would have been driven higher, with taxpayers paying the same amount of money for fewer students. Instead, the per-pupil costs increased, but relative to other districts, Bristol Warren remained basically the same — hovering around the top of the bottom-third in Rhode Island.

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Jim McGaw

A lifelong Portsmouth resident, Jim graduated from Portsmouth High School in 1982 and earned a journalism degree from the University of Rhode Island in 1986. He's worked two different stints at East Bay Newspapers, for a total of 18 years with the company so far. When not running all over town bringing you the news from Portsmouth, Jim listens to lots and lots and lots of music, watches obscure silent films from the '20s and usually has three books going at once. He also loves to cook crazy New Orleans dishes for his wife of 25 years, Michelle, and their two sons, Jake and Max.