Volusia Schools' administrative costs rise, bucking a trend, while enrollment stagnates
The administrative spending increase bucks a trend. Over a nine-year trend, costs peaked at 33% in 2020, the year that the COVID-19 epidemic hit, and dropped to 10% in 2023. The number for 2024 was 15%, according to the data.
Over the long haul, from 2015 to 2024, the Volusia County School District has seen a $6.5 million increase in administrative costs, when adjusting for inflation, while the number of full-time students dropped by more than 1,800.
Schools administrative costs slightly above state average
The administrative cost increases were slightly above the state average over nine years, with Volusia ranking 23rd-highest out of 65 counties, compared to the rest of the state. (Gadsden and Jefferson counties were removed due to faulty data.)
In the data released by the education department, the number of students enrolled is categorized as "unweighted full-time-equivalent students," which excludes students in charter schools or students who receive vouchers under the Family Empowerment Scholarship and/or McKay Scholarship.
So, while Volusia's administrative costs have been growing and outpacing Florida's average, Volusia is only slightly above average in its administrative to instructional spending ratio (31st out of 65 counties), according to an analysis by The News-Journal.
For reference, Polk County, which spends the lowest percent on administrative costs relative to instructional costs, spends only about 4.7% of its budget on administration. Franklin County spends the highest percentage on administrative costs relative to instructional costs, spending about 19.2%. Volusia is at about 8.27%
Enrollment lagging at Volusia schools
Stagnating enrollment isn't unique to Volusia. Statewide, the number of students in Florida's public education system has been static, thanks largely to the expansion of school choice initiatives.
In 2001, the Florida Legislature established the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTC) to give lower-income families more educational opportunities. Initially, the program required income verification, but Gov. Ron DeSantis removed the financial eligibility requirements in the 2023-2024 school year.
Personalized Education Program (PEP) and Family Empowerment Scholarships also led to expanded options for parents. In essence, the programs and other incentives create incentives for parents to seek schooling options outside of public schools.
'Over the course of the years, the legislature has increased the amount of scholarships available to parents in the state, when at its inception it had income verifications,' John Cash, chief of staff for Volusia County Schools, said. 'But then those income verifications are no longer in place, and they have continued to increase the PEP scholarships every year."
Cash said that means that as enrollment in the program increases, fewer parents will send their children to public schools, meaning less money will flow into the district's education system.
And the census data backs it up. From 2015 to 2023, the school-age population (5 to 17-year-olds) has increased by about 4,500 or 9%, according to the American Community Survey five-year data. Meanwhile, the number of full-time students enrolled in the district decreased by 1.3%.
The lower number of enrolled students has already affected the district's budget.
'When it materialized and there was a bigger growth in the scholarship program,' said Todd Seis, the chief financial officer for Volusia County Schools, in a June 24 workshop meeting with the school board. 'We planned for that reduction in revenue...and we just gave it back to the Department of Education.'
So why have costs been increasing when enrollment hasn't?
Federal and state laws have forced districts to evolve and, as a result, spend more money.
For example, Alyssa's law, which was named after a 14-year-old who died during the Parkland school shooting, forced districts to have panic alert systems. Drills and training for staff also increased costs, according to Seis.
Another example is having an internal auditor for districts with over $500 million in annual revenues. Volusia outsources the job to an external firm, but it also led to increased costs.
'The additional requirements established in 2018 have created the need for coordinated support across multiple departments,' Seis wrote in an email to The News-Journal, "including fiscal services, to ensure that internal auditors receive the information they need to complete their reports."
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Volusia schools' admin costs rise despite stagnant enrollment
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(When I put that critique to Macedo and Lee, Lee said, 'The idea that focused protection would be more difficult than to protect everyone is hard to wrap my mind around.') On top of that, in October 2020, the world was a few months away from having highly effective vaccines. 'Why needlessly risk the lives of so many people when vaccines were right around the corner?' Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, asked me. Osterholm had been an early lockdown skeptic—Macedo and Lee cite him approvingly at several points—but the imminent possibility of vaccination had made him change his tune. 'This was the moment when it made the least sense to take away NPIs,' he said. Although Collins regrets using the intemperate phrase quick and devastating takedown in that email exchange, he is adamant that public-health officials made the right call in coming out forcefully against the Great Barrington Declaration. 'If this proposal had been implemented, it would have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people,' Collins told me. 'There was no way we could just sit around silently and let that happen.' They didn't sit around; nor did they silence the Great Barrington Declaration or try to banish its authors to the scientific wilderness, as Macedo and Lee suggest. Yes, the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration came in for some personal abuse, usually by individual epidemiologists on social media. The official response, however, came in the form of a carefully argued article published in an academic journal that responded to the proposal's central claims, offering loads of counterarguments backed by scientific studies. What Macedo and Lee characterize as a subversion of public debate looks more like an example of the marketplace of ideas in action. At times, the revisionist narrative seems to exist in an alternate history in which the United States implemented a heavy-handed, centralized response to the pandemic. In reality, Donald Trump, who was president in 2020 (many COVID revisionists somehow overlook this), spent most of that year downplaying the severity of the pandemic, undermining public-health messaging, and refusing to implement or support the policies that public-health experts, doctors, and much of the country were begging for. The result was a shambolic and porous state-by-state patchwork rather than a unified national strategy to deploy the full resources of the federal government. Macedo and Lee nonetheless look back at that time and conclude that the U.S. did too much, not too little. In their view, there is no evidence that any of the various measures employed to control the virus, other than vaccines, saved any lives. They cite multiple analyses, including their own, that find no difference in pre-vaccination COVID mortality rates between blue states, which had tighter and longer-lasting restrictions, and red states, which had looser restrictions and ended them earlier. Although Macedo and Lee are careful not to explicitly conclude from these analyses that 'nothing worked,' it is hard to come away from their discussion of the evidence with any other view. 'We have to be honest with ourselves,' Lee told me. 'There are a lot of medical interventions that we think will be successful and then they don't work. Sometimes the evidence doesn't bear out what you expect to see.' David Frum: Why the COVID deniers won But the analyses that Macedo and Lee rely on fail to account for differences in the timing of when different states experienced their highest COVID death counts. Several blue states, including New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, were hit hard early, and the virus spread before they could implement much of an organized response. By one calculation, the Northeast experienced 56 percent of all U.S. COVID deaths from February through May 2020 despite containing just 17 percent of the country's population; the South, meanwhile, experienced just 17 percent of deaths. In the subsequent months, that dynamic reversed: Northeastern states saw their death rates plummet, while southern states saw their death rates spike. Blue states got hit earlier and harder, but once the pandemic went national, they performed much better. In our conversation, Macedo and Lee countered by pointing to examples of states that experienced the pandemic at similar times and had similar 2020 age-adjusted mortality rates, despite the fact that some (such as California) kept restrictions in place longer than others (such as Florida). But these cases run into a further complication: Although state-level analyses find no pre-vaccine difference in COVID deaths, they do estimate that the most restrictive states experienced about 30 percent fewer infections than the least restrictive ones, which is the precise outcome that NPIs are supposed to achieve. That is why Thomas Bollyky, the lead author of one of the state-level studies that Macedo and Lee cite, told me that he was shocked to hear his work being used to shed doubt on the effectiveness of NPIs. 'I feel like I'm having an Annie Hall–type moment,' Bollyky told me. 'These interventions were designed to reduce infections, and that's exactly what they did.' Why didn't they show an obvious impact on mortality, then? One possibility, Bollyky said, is that a long list of intermediating factors—including age, preexisting conditions, and health-care access—determine whether an infected person will die from COVID. These might be impossible to fully control for in state-by-state comparisons. Another is that the elderly, who were most at risk of dying from infection, were likely to voluntarily adhere to social-distancing policies even when official mandates went away. For example, although Florida was one of the first states to entirely lift restrictions, Bollyky and colleagues found that Florida residents, who are disproportionately elderly, stayed home and wore masks at higher rates than people in most other states. Lockdown policies might have been so effective at changing behavior that people kept following restrictions even after they were lifted, creating the false impression that policy didn't matter in the first place. (There were also plenty of Californians who disobeyed the orders that remained in place in their state, making those policies seem less effective.) Whether restrictions prevented the spread of COVID is a different question from whether they were worth the cost. Macedo, Lee, and Zweig are right that America's pandemic response was marked by a failure to properly weigh trade-offs. As they document at length, public-health officials often framed saving lives from the virus as the only legitimate objective of public policy, without considering the potential damage that would stem from the pursuit of that goal. Most public-health experts now seem to share that assessment. In July 2023, for instance, Collins expressed regret for what he called 'a public-health mindset' in which officials 'attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life' and 'zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people's lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered.' The COVID revisionists are right to criticize this tendency, but at times they fall victim to a mirror image of the same mindset: Lockdowns were all costs, no benefits, and thus should have been discarded. 'There is just no evidence that any of these measures actually prevented death,' Lee told me. 'So we have to ask ourselves: Should we really take the kinds of actions where the benefits are uncertain but we know the costs will be severe?' Zweig is even more direct. 'In the end, there was no benefit to keeping schools closed for so-called safety reasons out of 'an abundance of caution,'' he writes. 'And there were no reasonable trade-offs in doing so. There were just harms.' From the March 2025 issue: Why the COVID deniers won If ignoring the costs of lockdowns led in some cases to an overly restrictive response, ignoring the benefits could lead to an overly loose one. In many ways, we were lucky last time. The next virus—and there will be a next one—could be far deadlier. It could disproportionately target children or be much harder to vaccinate against. If all restrictions are off the table, the scale of the disaster could be unprecedented. The revisionist narrative also has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people are convinced that public-health measures don't work in the first place, they will be less likely to follow them, which, in turn, will render them even less effective. This dynamic could even undermine the one measure that the non-right-wing COVID revisionists generally support: vaccines. After all, if people are convinced that the public-health establishment is full of lying ideologues, why make an exception for vaccines? Unchecked COVID revisionism, in trying to correct the errors of the last pandemic, might leave us even less prepared for the next one.
