Tricky to figure how many Cobb jobs created

By Jeremy Redmon

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Have federal stimulus funds saved 315 jobs in Cobb County’s school system, or 1,222 jobs? Depends on how you do the math, but county officials say the first number is closer to correct.

State officials agree and recently switched the way they calculate jobs created or retained with certain stimulus funds after the original approach produced distorted results.

The federal government has not told states how to track jobs from “fiscal stabilization funds” used to shore up state and local school district budgets, said Greg Griffin, the state’s accounting officer. So the state has come up with its own ways to track the impact of these funds, which will exceed $1 billion in Georgia by next fiscal year.

Georgia’s current approach takes the total federal stabilization funds given to a district and divides it by the district’s average salary, not including benefits. Initially, the state divided the funds by the district’s total payroll and multiplied the result by total employees. That produced more jobs retained but with unrealistically low salaries, officials said.

“Most states wrestled with this and addressed it in different ways,” Griffin said. “So you are going to see different calculations and numbers of jobs reported for the stabilization funds across the country.”

Cobb County school officials say the $22.7 million they received helped them retain 315 jobs. They got that number by dividing the amount by the school system’s average salary plus benefits of $71,912.

The state’s first formula had resulted in 1,222 jobs retained, but with an average salary of about $18,500, said county school officials. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense for us,” Cobb County Board of Education Chairman John Abraham said.

Tom Gavin, a spokesman for the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, said the federal government has provided guidance, pointing to information on the U.S. Department of Education Web site.

State officials say the approach given there is unworkable.