In a benchmarking study evaluating Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) against other districts conducted by Partners in Education (PiE), volunteers discovered PAUSD’s performance rated with mixed results.

The six-month-long effort compared PAUSD with five other leading schools districts throughout the nation (Scarsdale in New York, New Trier/Wilmette in Illinois, Chapel Hill-Carrboro in North Carolina and Edina in Minnesota) chosen on the basis of school district demographics, community demographics and school district performance. Among the achievements of the school districts, all six boasted more than 50 percent adults with at least bachelor’s degrees, a 25 percentile SAT score of 1030 or higher and a total K-12 enrollment between 4,000 and 15,000.

The benchmarking study proved the PAUSD’s ability to overcome a low budget—PAUSD’s funding is a full $1030 lower than that of the other compared school districts—and succeed. Of the districts compared, PAUSD high schools had greater numbers of alternative programs and support program options than the other five school districts, and were among the upper tier in math and English course options. “The benchmarking study shows that we as a district compared to like-districts, in terms of socioeconomic factors, have the most limited budget,” Principal Noreen Likins said. “However, we are certainly on par and managing to keep up with the other districts.”

In other areas, though, PAUSD two high schools rated worse than the other school districts, with greater ratios of librarians and counselors to students, bigger class sizes and fewer numbers of social studies course options, science course options, music course options and vocational education course options.

Garland hopes that the study will inform the district of areas in which PAUSD lags behind other educational institutions of similar environments to help schools allocate future funding. “If and when public and private funds become available, PAUSD staff and the school board will need to set priorities for the use of these funds,” Garland said. “We hope that the benchmarking study will be helpful in this regard by highlighting those areas where PAUSD programs and staffing are below the norm of a set of our peers.”

Garland hopes that the study will also stress the importance of private funding for schools. “Without existing generous private support for PAUSD, our district’s spending per student would be approximately $1,700 less than the median,” Garland said.

Gunn will host a presentation of the PiE study on Dec. 14 at 2:15 p.m. in the library. All parents and students are welcome to attend.