I think I’m a concerned Amherst citizen despite town budgetary matters boring me, conspiracy theories concerning schools and land deals repelling me, and occasional college students behaving like hysterical monkeys mistakenly released because no one locked their shackles at bedtime annoying me. (Except when they live nearby. My neighbors have decibel sound meters to document the huddled student masses yearning to scream free. Random kindness acts also work.)

So, I was surprised to find myself inviting more boredom by pondering the $100 million elementary school price tag. I think it was the numerical form $100,000,000.00 with all those zeroes that snared me. Perhaps I’d have escaped its terrifying delights if I hadn’t seen, in close contiguity, the new school capacity of 575 children.

Proudly I declare I heroically resisted dividing 100,000,000 by 575 and arriving at an “Ah ha!” I remembered there’d be 575 students per semester for the life of the school. So what was that lifetime? I couldn’t know so I perhaps too generously supposed the school would last 50 years.

Then I recalled the school was for K-5, kindergarten through fifth grade. Simplifying, I assumed children would be evenly distributed over the six grades, so that each year 96 kids leave, and a new 96 come in.

The school starts off in the first year with 575 kids, at the end of each year burps out 96 kids that have completed fifth grade and swallows into kindergarten a new 96. After 50 years the school will have digested 5,279 kids. Then, in 2073, like the wonderful one-hoss shay, the school crumbles into dust, exquisitely, inducing another world-famous Amherst political struggle concerning whether to convert into an elementary school one of the 12, seven-story parking garages that by then will be scattered throughout town.

The above gave a first guesstimate of the new elementary school costs per student: $100,000,000/5,279 equals $18,943. Large, but only the cost of the new building per student. I knew students required other expenditures.

A School Facilities Cost Calculator that sorts costs into operating, administrative, and capital costs required I come up with 17 sub-costs. Yuk! So I used the Elementary School Budget for Amherst, $24.4 million, divided by the number of elementary school students, 1,182, to estimate annual cost per elementary school student of $20,643. Combining the costs per student of the new school, $20,643, and the cost of building and running the new school, $18,943, gives $39,586. Call it, $40,000.

This approach to contemplating school finance likely has problems, and the question “What does the new school cost per student?” may be unconventional, uninteresting and misleading. Please hold other persons entirely responsible for such flaws. I’ve merely innocently pursued my curiosity, prodded by a big number.

Friends warned I should expect accusations of being a right-wing conservative book-banning anti-school hoodlum. Not I! I agree that a new school is needed. I favor a new elementary school. I just want to know what to think about that big number.

So, what to make of $40,000 per student? Extrapolating to 2023 from the 2018 figures for the top 25% of expenditures for elementary and secondary school I get a ballpark top number of about $25,000 per pupil per year for that same quartile. That leaves a gap of $15,000 per pupil between Amherst’s $40,000 and the top public school expenditures for elementary school pupils.

How to rationalize the gap? Deferred maintenance helps. The existing schools have not been maintained properly for years. Suppose, say, 30 years. An additional $500 per pupil spent on maintenance over 30 years would account for the $15,000 gap.

These “computations” leave us in the most expensive elementary school bracket but they remove the sticker shock by returning the seemingly enormous expenditure to a sensible number.

The average cost of the top 25 private elementary schools in Massachusetts is $44,107. Our costs are spread over the whole town instead of just one child’s parents. And that fabulous town has the flagship university campus and two eminent colleges as bonuses, with two more colleges close by.

My family came to Amherst in 1971 in part because the schools outclassed those in Champaign-Urbana. I was not disappointed.

Two mice still nibble at my mind. I’d like to hear from someone who actually knows the numbers and how to report them to the public, and I’m aware that estimates of future costs are never too high, always too low.

Richard S. Bogartz is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.