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Vanderbilt, Michigan - 1 schools
At $17,688 per pupil, Vanderbilt Area Schools ranks #59 of 821 Michigan districts by per-pupil spending (Michigan districts). NCES F-33 finance data.
98
Total Enrollment
1
Schools
$17,688
Per-Pupil Spending
Combined
School Types
District-Level NCES Analysis
Vanderbilt Area Schools operates 1 public schools serving 98 students, placing it among the smallest districts in Michigan. The school portfolio breaks down into 1 combined schools, a small enough portfolio that most families will interact with nearly every campus in the district at some point. These enrollment and school figures come from the NCES Common Core of Data (CCD) 2024-25 release, and the district is based in Otsego County.
Per-pupil expenditure runs $17,688 according to the NCES F-33 School District Finance Survey, among the top 83 of 821 Michigan districts by per-pupil spending. See how Michigan compares in our national per-pupil spending analysis. The funding mix is 62.0% local, 9.3% state, and 28.7% federal, a local-revenue-heavy mix that leaves the district more exposed to property-tax swings and local ballot measures than state-funded peers.
and 54.2% chronic absenteeism from the 2021-22 Civil Rights Data Collection. Demographically, the student body averages 98.6% White across the district's schools.
Its largest campus is Vanderbilt Area School, enrolling 72 students (100% of the district's total enrollment).
Vanderbilt Area School accounts for 73.5% of all Vanderbilt Area Schools student enrollment
That is an overwhelming concentration, leaving the rest of Vanderbilt Area Schools a distant remainder — means Vanderbilt Area Schools-wide averages can mask substantial variation outside the dominant entity. Grade band: combined. A single dominant campus often anchors a district's program offerings and staffing patterns; the share helps explain why district-wide averages may not reflect the typical neighbourhood-school experience. When one entity dominates a region's footprint, its programmatic and budget decisions effectively set policy for a majority of the affected population.
Vanderbilt Area Schools has higher-than-average Title I eligibility — 81.6% of the population qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch
free or reduced-price lunch eligibility is the federal threshold for Title I funding allocations, established under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015). Areas above 75% eligibility — including this one — receive concentration grants on top of the basic Title I formula. Regions with eligibility this high typically draw a substantially larger federal funding share relative to their local tax base, which can either offset or reinforce existing gaps depending on allocation policy.
Vanderbilt Area Schools chronic absenteeism rate is 54.2% — well above typical (typically associated with unusually large scale or acute resource constraints)
chronic absenteeism rate is the simplest comparative metric but it does not capture the full picture: a student is chronically absent if they miss ≥10% of enrolled days for any reason, illness, family obligations, or disengagement Values this far above typical often signal acute resource constraints or a structurally different scale than most peers — worth reading alongside the underlying counts, not the ratio alone.