My guess is that most of the costs are for the special transportation needs of the disabled (kids who have an “individualized education plan”.
A while back, we had this push to “mainline” disabled kids, to make them “feel better”. Frankly, a lot of the costs of public schools are driven by these special needs kids.
I don’t think most taxpayers understand how much of their money is spent to provide cradle-to-grave care and nurturing for those who are disabled.
Especially when many of them aren’t what you would considered “disabled”.
When my son first started school, he did not communicate well verbally. The school suggested he should be put in a special speech program. I told them I didn’t want to cost money, and their response was that their federal funding was based on how many kids they signed up, so each kid they could bring into the program actually lowered the total cost of the program to our school system.
This no doubt encourages the re-labelling of kids as needing special care, which drives up the costs overall.
Anyway, it wouldn’t take that many kids who need a medical professional to transport the child from their apartment to school and back, to drive up overall costs to $6900 per student.
I occasionally go to school, and I often see the special needs kids being walked around the halls. Each kid being pushed around by an adult employee. So you can imagine that for these kids, the cost per student for school is about the cost of a full-time employee, $50,000 or more.