Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Blecher_onthe_Hudson t1_iu6bkbf wrote

Reply to comment by SyndicalistCPA in Please explain like I'm 5: JCBOE election ballot by Affectionate-Buy2539

I'm trying to see how we spend more than anyone else in the nation on our school system. Sorting helps understand the context. Say we are near the top of our group in teacher salaries, but what if the group only varies by a few percent, then that's not conclusive of much, right? But without sorting by spending, that's hard to see.

I downloaded the files since they no longer allow you to view the data online as in the past.

1

SyndicalistCPA t1_iu6nhy5 wrote

I'd have to know which file you are looking at but the one file I clicked already had filters on. Inside the filter you can sort by "largest to smallest". Not sure if that helps or how familiar you are with excel.

2

Blecher_onthe_Hudson t1_iu714g9 wrote

Those filters do not apparently function in spreadsheets other than actual Excel, which is often not owned by people like me who have no reason to invest in the MS pro suite. In LibreOffice (open source) I get this error "Ranges containing merged cells can only be sorted without formats." I managed to get them to sort in Google Sheets, but not by those filters. So I need to download the files, then upload them to google!

Government agencies should not publish data in proprietary formats. Jersey City distributed a sheet about boiler inspections in a Word doc instead of a PDF! Yes, I know PDF is originally Adobe, but at this point there's many readers/writers and I've never had a problem with it. Word often has problems with interoperability, as apparently does Excel.

But, to get back to your inquiry as to why focus on teachers rather than bloated admin staff and salaries: teacher are 56% of the overall budget while admin is 8%. I shouldn't need to tell a CPA to follow the money!

Have you ever taken a look at the JCPS "user friendly budget"? I did. I found line item terms that Google couldn't define!

1