Categories for DailyPost

Jun 10

2024

Price gouging that makes Terry Pegula look good

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If you’re a regular reader of this column, you know I’m not a fan of the way Terry Pegula operates his sports teams. (Personal seat licenses, for staters.) But there is something to be said about how he prices Sabres tickets, although the size of our market probably has a lot more to do with it than his benevolence. The Arizona Coyotes of the National Hockey League are relocating to Salt Lake City for the coming season and the team last week announced its ticket prices. Let’s compare with Buffalo. Season tickets in the lower seating bowl for the Sabres [...]

Posted 8 months ago

Jun 7

2024

Buffalo-areas schools spending about $28,000 per student

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Thirty-nine school budgets totaling $4 billion were recently approved in Erie and Niagara counties for the upcoming school year. The money will educate some 138,000 public school students in kindergarten through 12th grade. The individual budgets range from a low of $17.7 million in North Collins, the smallest school district, with just 564 students, to a high of almost $1 billion in the largest district, Buffalo public schools, with some 30,000 students. (Charter schools in the Buffalo area, with some 12,000 students, are not included in this analysis.) We looked at per pupil spending - total budget divided by enrollment.[...]

Posted 8 months ago

Jun 6

2024

Charters outperform urban public schools in reading

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The reading skills of young students who attend charter schools in and around Buffalo are slightly better than those attending urban public schools, an Investigative Post analysis has found. The results of 2023’s testing showed 30 percent of third through fifth grade students at the 19 charter schools tested in Erie and Niagara counties could read and write at or above grade level, according to the New York State Education Department.  That compares with 25 percent of students in the same grades in Buffalo public schools. “There’s more we want to achieve for our kids, clearly,” said Fatimah Barker, executive[...]

Posted 8 months ago

Jun 5

2024

Erie County making headway on foster care

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Illustration by Christine Ongjoco. This story is being co-published with The Imprint, a national nonprofit news outlet covering child welfare and youth justice. Where Kin Come First: The Imprint’s first-ever analysis of how often New York counties place foster children with relatives found huge gaps across county lines. This story reveals how counties that prioritize kin are keeping children within family networks. Part two of a two-part series. Read part one here.   In 2018, when her young nephew was found wandering outside alone, Krystal Henderson got a call from the Chemung County social services agency. Would she and her husband[...]

Posted 8 months ago

Jun 4

2024

Falling short on foster care

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Illustration by Christine Ongjoco.  This story is being co-published with The Imprint, a national nonprofit news outlet covering child welfare and youth justice. Where Kin Come First: The Imprint’s analysis of New York child welfare agencies’ reliance on family and friends reveals where children end up depends a lot on geography. Part one of a two-part series. Six years ago, the federal government made a dramatic shift in the way it funds foster care. Instead of only paying states after they removed children from parents accused of abuse or neglect, local authorities could be reimbursed to avoid family separation through[...]

Posted 8 months ago

Jun 3

2024

Numbers dispute the claims of a WNY renaissance

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Some numbers caught my eye in the new edition of the WNY Economic News produced by economic professors at Canisius University.  And I quote: National payroll employment has surpassed its pre-COVID peak by more than 7 million jobs while WNY employment is more than 12,000 below its pre-COVID peak.  As they have been since the late 1980s, wages for workers in the Buffalo MSA [metropolitan statistical area] are lower than wages for workers in most industries in the United States. Thus, it should not be a surprise that the most recent data for the Buffalo MSA shows that the average wage[...]

Posted 8 months ago

May 31

2024

Buff State has rock bottom graduation rates

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We pulled graduation rates for SUNY's 20 universities and four-year comprehensive colleges with campuses, using full-time students who entered as freshmen in 2013. (We wanted to avoid the pandemic years.) The average four-year graduation rate was 55 percent. By six years, the average graduation rate was 68 percent. Buffalo State had the lowest four-year graduation rate, 28 percent. It also had the lowest five-year and six-year rates. UB 's four-year graduation rate was in the mid-range, and a few points higher in the five and six-year categories. Geneseo had one of the highest graduation rates among the 20 SUNY schools.[...]

Posted 9 months ago

May 30

2024

A different approach to revitalizing Buffalo’s East Side

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What do you like about your neighborhood, the interviewer asked. What are your concerns? How optimistic are you that things will get better? There was no right or wrong answer for the 567 residents who took the survey, but their responses will help determine which neighborhood serves as a pilot to help rebuild Buffalo’s East Side and elevate the city’s Black community. Henry Taylor, director of the University at Buffalo’s Center for Urban Studies, unveiled the framework last November in “How We Change the Black East Side: A Neighborhood Planning and Development Framework.”  The model poses a radical challenge to[...]

Posted 9 months ago
Investigative Post