Welcome to the 2021-22 fiscal year and legislative session and welcome to PASBO's Data Dive series.

As part of our Strategic Plan, PASBO's research, advocacy and professional development teams have expanded and aligned our efforts to provide analysis and learning opportunities related school financial management and operations to members and non-members alike.

Towards this goal, we are delivering bite-sized data and review of Pennsylvania school finance and policy through exploration of numerous topics and important aspects of a topic each day by email. This archive here on our website serves as a general reference center for our detailed information, data and statistics in hopes to help anyone and everyone understand the mechanics, dynamics, challenges and needs of public education in Pennsylvania.

PASBO's Data Dive series highlights a wide range of topics in school finance and school business operations written directly by our members and staff with the expertise and experience in each of the covered topics. The series starts off basic and works through a new aspect within a broader topic in each edition. Topics include the basic budgetary concepts of revenue and expendiures, property taxes and assessed value, state basic education funding, special education and funding, charter schools, personnel and compensation, pupil transportation, school facilities and so much more!

Additionally, Data Dive is designed to be a central location where you can find education-related data and our forthcoming Source Data Reference will provide a resource to find and access web links to important education data sources. A citation for the various related data sources will added to each data dive along with future downloadable features.

To begin diving into our school finance series, we first suggest learning how to use our interactive data maps by watching our video tutorial here. If you have questions, comments or would like to subscribe to our emails, please reach out to Dr. Andrew Armagost, PASBO's Research and Advocacy Manager.

When you're ready, please select "Table of Contents" to begin exploring all our Data Dives.

• Each of our maps illustrate data relevant to the topic of the day for each school district.
• Click on the map title above to open in a new browser window full screen.
• You can find the map legend at the top left of your screen after opening the map. 
• Hover over any school district with your mouse to open a pop-up label providing information associated with that school district.
• Using a map's widgets located on the right side, you can filter school districts by county and locale type (urban, suburban, town, or rural) and occasionally by other factors as well.