As a point of information, because it’s in front of me… In Baltimore and 6 counties surrounding (Anne Arundel, Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Carroll, Frederick, Harford, Howard), I’ve found 71 public school dance programs with dedicated instructors. Most (44) are high schools, with 23 middle schools and 4 elementary schools.
It’s not entirely fair (I don’t know about their individual workloads or schedules, and some definitely teach more than dance), but the average teacher salary in Maryland hovers around $60,000. If there are 71 [different] dance teachers in public schools in Maryland, that alone represents something around $4,000,000 in dance-teacher wages.
Straying even further into the speculative, if each of these teachers has just 30 students, that’s more than 2000 dancers-in-training in the public schools.
Does anyone have suggestions about where to find data to validate the speculative? How many students does a public school dance teacher teach in a given school year? Are dance teacher salaries in line with average teacher salaries? What do the private schools add to this?