It’s really amazing just how much is spent per pupil. 14K per student in CA or DC, I forget which. You could have a private tutor for each kid, limo service to/from school, gourmet lunches for each student, and still have about 10K/student left over for “expenses”.
You do have to count special education costs in those for public schools, and private schools do not typically have those. If they do, then the cost can easily go up to 30-40K per year.
I would like to see special education funding pulled out of the accounting for public schools. It would be interesting to see how they compare.
Of course, my daughter got “special ed services” when she was in public school. However, it wasn’t much, and it wasn’t enough to help her. In elementary we paid about $5000 per year for private sceech which was 1 hour for individual therapy each week, $8000 for a private school, and $1500 for a reading program at the school. It was multi-sensory reading program for dsylexia which met daily for 2 hours with 2 other kids. The public school only provided the regular classroom and 40 minutes of group therapy. They would not provide a reading program.
It would have been cheaper for the public school to put my daughter in private school with the reading program and 1 on 1 speech. Also, some of the speech therapy was covered by our insurance. The public schools could easily contract our speech therapy to private therapist who come into the schools, and then they could only cover the portion that insurance doesn’t cover.