Standard Form for School Financial Statistics
NEWS AND COMMENT.
The U. S. Census Bureau has issued a pamphlet in which Messrs L. G. Powers and W. S. Small present and describe a standard form for reporting the financial statistics of public schools. The proposed form “is the logical outcome of a schedule arranged jointly by the Bureau of the Census and the U. S. Bureau of Education in the spring of 1909. Its use by the agents of the census for a few cities in 1909 and for all the cities of the country of over 30,000 inhabitants in 1910 demonstrated the need on the part of our city school systems of some common method of recording and publishing financial and other data. That use also disclosed certain imperfections of the schedule itself. In 1910 the Bureau of the Census, by correspondence and conference with representatives of the U. S. Bureau of Education, the National Education Association, and tlie National Association of School Accounting Officers, and with many school superintendents, worked out the form of report here presented and the accompanying instructions. These are offered in the hope that study and discussion of the same may lead to the adoption of a uniform method of reporting financial data by the public school systems of the country.”
Among the advantages of the new form are the following: “1. It makes a sharp distinction between expenses, or costs of conducting school systems, and outlays, or costs of acquiring, constructing, and equipping permanent school properties, and calls for the separation of the two classes of costs, each from the other, and both from all other expenditures.
“2. It provides for an orderly arrangement of all receipts and payments under significant titles. In terminology and classification it corresponds with Schedule G 34 now in use by the Bureau of the Census for reporting the financial statistics of schools… .
“3. It presents a double classification of jjayments according to (a) the object of payments, and (b) the kind or type of educational activity thereby supported. Thus payments for teaching (an object of payment) are distributed into those for elementary schools, secondary schools, etc. (a kind of educational activity). This double classification is systematically carried out.” In closing their monograph the authors make a suggestion which will be cordially approved by all who have occasion to use public school statistics. “It is recommended that cities and school districts, . . make reports showing their financial transactions for a period identical with their school year. Such reports, if generally prepared, would make school statistics strictly comparable, and thus of greater value than at present.”
s Copies may be obtained on application to E. Dana Durand, Esq., Director of the Census, Washington, D. C.
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