A one-minute estimate for school leaders

What the current approach is costing your building.

Every referral that arrives because an adult didn't know what else to do costs someone's time. Put your own numbers in and see the estimate. Nothing is sent anywhere, and you can change every assumption behind the math.

Your building

Teachers and instructional staff

Everyone who would sit in a faculty meeting.

Office referrals in a typical month

Behavior referrals that reach an administrator or counselor.

Teachers who left in the last two years

Resignations and non-returns, not retirements.

Change the assumptions behind this math

Adult minutes per referral

Covers the incident, the conversation, the documentation, and the follow-up. There is no published national figure for this. Twenty-five minutes is a deliberately low placeholder — use what your own administrators say.

Share of referrals driven by attention, executive function, or regulation (%)

Set this to whatever your own referral data shows. Forty percent is a placeholder, not a research finding.

Loaded hourly cost of administrator and counselor time ($)

Salary plus benefits, divided by contracted hours. Your business manager has this figure exactly.

Cost to replace one teacher

Learning Policy Institute, “2024 Update: What’s the Cost of Teacher Turnover?” Per-teacher estimates in 2024 dollars, averaged from five studies across nine districts, covering separation, recruiting, hiring, and training. Methodology

What that adds up to

adult hours a year spent responding to behavior a trained faculty handles in the room

Referrals a year315
Of those, attention, executive function, or regulation driven126
Administrator and counselor time, in full school days8
Value of that time$2,888
Teacher replacement, annualized over two years$23,720
Estimated annual cost of the current approach$26,608

Annual membership costs $4,995 for your whole faculty. That is about $119 per teacher for a building of 42. That is 5× less than the estimated cost of the current approach.

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Send this to your district

Edit anything you like. This is written to be forwarded to a business manager or an assistant superintendent without further explanation.

Subject: What our current approach to behavior is costing us

I ran our numbers through a short estimate and wanted to share what it shows.

Our building, by the numbers I entered:
- Teachers and instructional staff: 42
- Office referrals in a typical month: 35
- Teachers who left in the last two years: 4

What that adds up to (assumptions are mine and adjustable):
- Referrals a year: 315
- Attention, executive function, or regulation driven: 126
- Administrator and counselor time: about 53 hours (8 full school days)
- Value of that time: $2,888
- Teacher replacement, annualized over two years: $23,720
- Estimated annual cost of the current approach: $26,608

For comparison, Attention-Ready Schools is a school-wide professional development program on ADHD, executive function, anxiety, learning differences, and emotional regulation. It costs $4,995 a year for the whole faculty. For our staff size that works out to about $119 per teacher.

They provide a formal quote, a W-9, and vendor registration forms, so it can go through as a direct purchase order.

Details: attentionreadyschools.com/training
Estimate: attentionreadyschools.com/tools/what-its-costing

How this is calculated

Referrals a year assumes a nine-month school year at the monthly figure you entered.
The attention share is the portion of referrals where the driver is attention, executive function, or regulation rather than a deliberate choice. We have no research basis for a national figure and do not claim one. Set it to what your own referral data shows.
Adult time per referral covers the incident, the conversation, the documentation, and the follow-up — not just the minutes the student sits in the office. This is a school-specific figure and the default is a placeholder.
School days convert adult hours at 6.5 hours per working day.
Teacher replacement uses the Learning Policy Institute’s 2024 per-teacher turnover estimates, in 2024 dollars, spread across the two years you entered. LPI’s figures average five studies covering nine districts and include separation, recruiting, hiring, and training. They do not include student learning loss, which LPI notes is a real cost their estimates leave out.

What this model deliberately leaves out

It does not estimate the cost of special education evaluations. There is no credible published figure for what it costs a district to conduct one, and more importantly, reducing evaluations is not a goal we would put a number on. Under IDEA’s Child Find obligation a school must evaluate when it suspects a disability, and no training program should imply otherwise. Better classroom response should mean students are identified more accurately, not less often.

This is an estimate built from figures you supply and assumptions you can change. It is not an audit, a guarantee of savings, or a claim about outcomes at any particular school. Attention-Ready Schools provides professional development for educators — not medical care or diagnosis.

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