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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- A legislative audit released Friday said the Utah State Office of Education is incorrectly counting how many classes are offered in elementary school, resulting in reports that average class sizes in those grades are lower than in reality.
The state reports that average class sizes range from 21 students in kindergarten to 25 students in sixth grade.
But about 8 percent of those class sizes are reported inaccurately, the audit said. It said the actual average class size is one student more in each grade, meaning the kindergarten average class size is actually 22 and the sixth grade average is really 26 students.
Utah has long had the nation's largest class sizes, primarily because it has the country's highest birth rate.
State lawmakers have spent about $875 million since 1993 attempting to reduce class sizes with little success. The additional money has been spent hiring teachers, but that merely keeps class sizes from increasing.
In 2007, frustrated lawmakers ordered an audit to explain why the additional funding had little effect.
The audit found that most school districts don't track how the money is spent, but those that do are using it to hire teachers. Yet the state's explosive growth in the past decade has made it difficult for state funding to keep up.
Since then, legislators have tried to get a better idea of class sizes.
State offices of education and school districts around the country use a variety of different methods to gauge class size, including student-to-teacher, student-to-adult and student-to-classes offered ratios.
Lawmakers have ordered the State Office of Education to report all three.
"While the number of students is constant, the number of teachers and adults can vary depending on what staff is included," the audit says.
When reviewing the student-to-classes offered ratio, auditors found that some school districts had major problems with how they calculated that figure.
The Alpine School District incorrectly counted 27 percent of its classes, according to the audit. That led the district to report that in fifth grade the average class size was 23 students, while the audit said it is actually 27.
There are two main reasons school districts inaccurately reported their class sizes, the audit said.
The first is that some classes have more than one grade in a class and districts are reporting them as separate classes.
Second, some school districts allow a class to be broken into multiple sections and then count those as separate classes.
State Office of Education State Superintendent Patti Harrington said she agrees with the audit's recommendation that improvements are needed.
"USOE is committed to improving our processes and has welcomed the audit as an opportunity to get objective feedback on our processes and products," she wrote. "The audit provided a very good review and can only improve the reporting process."
(Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
