There are about 1600 non-school employees, which means that the district administration is about 8% of the district workforce. This is a very good ratio: by way of comparison in the early nineties New York city had 4 administrators for every teacher (and no, that's not a typo!).

You inspired me to do some more digging, and it looks like Fairfax has a median household income of $71,000, as compared to the national average of $40,000. This means that Fairfax presumably has a lot of the upper-middle class families that both a) send their kids to public school, and b) have the time and the money to get involved in the local schools. I would guess that the PTOs are very active in your district.

However, one of my other guesses -- that Fairfax would have a high voter turnout in local elections -- turned out to be wrong. In the May 2000 local elections, the voter turnout in Fairfax was 10%, as compared to the statewide average of 25%. This surprised me, because I had always thought that active pressure from the community on the school board was essential to making sure the school administration worked properly.

I'll have to do some more digging to figure this out. When I get the time, I plan on running a regression between the local election voter turnouts and administrative overhead to see if there is a correlation.