Leesburg, Florida is the third fastest growing city in the United States. In fact, the city has increased in population by 18% in the past year. The city manager claims that 99% of that increase is due to The Villages, a nearby retirement community that is infamous for its frat house style elderly shenanigans. The houses in The Villages aren’t cheap- the average home in the area is selling for well over $400k.
Since Leesburg is located about an hour north of Orlando in Lake County, which is the county that wraps around the west and northwest side of the Orlando metro area, these new homeowners are paying school district property taxes, but the Lake county school district doesn’t have to provide any services. This is a huge cash cow for the county’s schools, with each home bringing in about $300 a year in school taxes. This means that the new construction is adding about $4.2 million in new tax revenue annually, and it’s being compounded each year as new homes are being built.
Other towns in Lake county are experiencing similar growth- Clermont, which is located about 20 miles south of Leesburg, has doubled in population in the past decade.
That’s why I was surprised to see that the Lake County School district is crying poor, claiming that they have a $35 million deficit, which they are attributing to a loss of 1,500 students. They said it’s partially because of the drop in birth rates in Lake County and the rise in private school vouchers. The county is claiming that they are losing $50 million a year to private schools. I say bullshit.
The county school board has an annual budget of nearly $730 million with a total enrollment of 48,500 students. If they are losing $50 million to vouchers, that represents 6,250 students, which is about 13% of total enrollment.
No, this deficit is due to mismanagement and waste, like most government money. For $15,000 a year per student, the taxpayers of Lake county should demand better. Our entire government, from the dog catcher to the President, is an exercise in poor management.
5 Comments
Georgiaboy61 · May 23, 2025 at 1:01 pm
Re: “That’s why I was surprised to see that the Lake County School district is crying poor, claiming that they have a $35 million deficit, which they are attributing to a loss of 1,500 students.”
If your area is like where I used to live in N. Illinois, the real money sink is administration. The humble third-grade teacher is buying school supplies for her students out of her none-too-generous salary, while the superintendent of schools makes 400K and works in a giant fancy and new administration building, along with an army of well-paid coworkers whose “contribution” to education is the shuffling of paper.
And when budgets get tight, is it administrative bloat which is cut? No, they cut classroom budgets, the better to dupe the public into believing that more funding is needed. The whole system is backwards, upside-down and a racket from top to bottom.
SoCoRuss · May 23, 2025 at 1:43 pm
$15k/year and the kids cant read,write or do math. Imagine what these useless commie utopians could accomplish with MORE money for the children of course…..
Henry · May 24, 2025 at 8:13 am
Back when I was working for a Fortune 500 company that actually manufactured products in the US, we had a metric that was monitored by the finance folks in HQ: directs to indirects. For every technician on the manufacturing floor who was assembling products (the “directs”) there was also a collection of folks supporting him (the “indirects” – managers, purchasing agents, manufacturing engineers, equipment repair techs, planners, etc.). School districts can (and should) be measured in a similar fashion: directs (classroom teachers) to indirects (administrators, curriculum coordinators, technology coordinators, secretaries, etc). Time and time again, we have observed enormous growth in non-teaching, high-paid indirects compared to modest or even no growth in the number of teachers. One can argue that all that indirect overhead is precisely why DM’s point about waste and mismanagement is the problem. It’s very easy to spend “other peoples’ money.”
My uncle was a superb high school math teacher (30+ years) and he pointed to two developments in our education system that accelerated the decline of American education: the issuing of doctorates in Education, and the emergence of bullshit administrators like Curriculum Coordinators.
TJ · May 24, 2025 at 8:29 am
How to fix? Anything less than catastrophic just won’t do the job. And all the old women (of both sexes) simply will not let that happen. School board elections are odd ducks. Very local but still fueled by globalist delusions. Sorry to say, but women are the lynch pin.
wojtek · May 25, 2025 at 9:57 pm
The news says something different. They do not say the school is running a deficit – they are saying the impact of various factors this and the next school year will total $35M, which they say they will have to balance. Furthermore they specify that the per student contribution is $8K, which they expect to have a $12M impact on their next budget. But they are complaining about other things, which together should add up to 35M over two years. Why are they doing this for 2 years if their budget is annual? I don’t know but I would guess they hire quite good manipulators 🙂
Overall 15K per student in annual funding seems like a lot. But it’s not really that much. In Poland there is a national voucher program and its value at the moment is supposedly about 21K per child. OK, so it’s PLN not USD. But it’s not so clear to me if we should look at the nominal exchange rate (~1:3,75) or the PPP one (~1:1.65)? Either way I’d say these costs are quite comparable between PL and FL, and naturally the voucher only covers a portion of the actual costs. And I certainly would not say that the Polish school system is ridden with overspending 🙂 So I doubt yours is.
Out of curiosity I checked the costs of attending some catholic high schools in your area, and these costs actually come up to approx $20K per year, with catholic school teachers complaining of being under compensated relative to public school teachers, and with catholic schools having the privilege of choosing whom to admit.
Public schools, like public anything, seem like an easy target when it comes to money. But you are incorrect in complaining here about the costs. For one of two possible reasons:
1) because $15K per student does not sound like that much money in one of the richest countries in the world
2) or because you are wrong about the actual budget and are missing something.
I actually think it is #2 – I can’t believe that the cost of educating a kid in PL is comparable to that of educating a kid in FL. In fact what I see is that the LCS budget for AY 24/25 is closer to $1.2B. So ~$25K per kid. This I actually could believe.
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