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I will not respond to most of your comments and I'll let the readers judge for themselves. But I wanted to clarify the costs and "fringe" issue.
The nationwide average cost per student in a comprehensive K-12 private school is $9.2K and in public K-12 school it is $10.3K (2007-8 data). This is as close to apples-to-apples comparison as one can get. Both populations include SWD (sp. ed.) students. Incidentally, the fraction of SWD in public schools with serious handicaps is 2-3%, quite similar to the >2% of SWD in the private school universe that need to go to specialized schools. In general the cost for ELL students is quite similar to cost of regular students. You can follow the links I provided how these are calculated if you want to know more.
I called the "fringe effect" the problems caused by students not coming in packages of 20 (or 25, or 28, or whatever the school or district consider a standard class size). Perhaps on this forum I should have called it the modulo effect, or the residuum effect (smile). Typically districts have an average number target, with minimum and maximum specified for a class. As an example, in K-2 it can be 22 as a target, with 16 and 25 as the extremes. In high school it could be 28 with 10 & 35 as extremes. Administrators face this daily and they often solve this problem by moving a few students across schools in the same district. Small districts, obviously, have less flexibility -- they will sometimes make a multi-grade class to solve such problems. Depending on the situation, reducing enrollment by just a handful of student may sometime eliminate the need of a whole class, or not. But on the average the number of students and the number of classes are directly proportional.
Ze'ev