Start here
This is a projection of a year nobody has argued about yet. FY28 has not been decided, presented or debated. What follows is what the district’s own published growth rates produce when you run them forward — which is the point of doing it now rather than in January.
Figures for FY27 and earlier are from the town’s published budget and tax records. FY28 onward are this model’s arithmetic, shown in full at every step so you can disagree with it precisely. Nothing here is rounded to flatter an argument.
The short version
Six things and two pictures. Everything after this is the working — the same facts in the order somebody has to meet them, with every number derived where you can disagree with it. Each card below links to the step that shows its arithmetic, and says whether it is the town’s published record or this model’s.
No FY28 budget exists yet. Run the district’s own published growth rates forward one year — same staff, same 1,581 children — and they produce a shortfall of $680,870. The year after: $1.32M.
How this was worked out →The budget now in force cut 9.2 positions and $1,174,933 — four classroom teachers, an interventionist and a half, an assistant principal, a custodian. The gap above opens on top of that. Not a failure: see the next card.
How this was worked out →Proposition 2½ caps what the town may collect. Nothing caps insurance. Two things compounding at different speeds pull apart for ever, and the distance grows on its own with nobody doing anything wrong.
How this was worked out →Salaries and health insurance are 64% of the budget: one bargained with the unions, one bought by the Town. Sports, clubs and administrators are an amount, not a direction.
How this was worked out →Chapter 70 and the rest are $11.88M a year, 24% of everything the town collects. It is not missing from the charts below — it is inside the orange line, growing at 2%. Worth asking the delegation for; not worth planning around.
How this was worked out →New building raises that same orange line, and the schools keep 54¢ of each dollar. Holding the projection from that side alone takes $145.91M of new value a year — 95% of the town’s whole commercial base, added again every year.
How this was worked out →The town certified $3.35M this year, 6.55% of its budget against a stated aim of 5–7%. About $795k of it could go to the schools each year without breaching that. But this year was a record: an ordinary one certifies $2.03M — 3.96%, already below the floor, with nothing to redirect. And it is the capital programme’s money: free cash funded $655k of last year’s $1.23M capital plan, so $795k is more than that whole year’s share of it — as it is in 7 of the 10 years the plan publishes.
How this was worked out →The problem, in one picture
FY28 $681k short
FY39 $12.63M short
Neither line is a plan. Both are the published growth rates run forward: the blue one is what today’s staff, buses and buildings cost as they get a year older, and the orange one is everything the town is allowed to collect. The shaded wedge is the gap. The point is not the size of the number on the right — it is that the wedge never closes on its own, and nothing in the picture is anybody misbehaving.
What is inside the orange line
The nature of the fixes
The same chart four times, on one scale. Cutting and an override drop the blue line and leave its angle alone, so it climbs back to the orange one at the speed it was climbing before. Changing a rate bends the blue line. Building lifts the orange one. The gray dashes are what costs do if nothing is done.
Every sport, the band, the clubs, 60% of technology and every administrative line the law allows — $1.50M, taken out at once
What it costs4 whole categories of the thing the schools are for, gone at once. After them, only classroom positions are large enough to cut.
Funded for 2 years, then widening again at the same rate it was widening before — $10.24M short by FY39.
$1,290,051 on the ballot, written for the schools alone so they keep every dollar — $268 a year on the average home
What it costs$268 a year on the average home, permanently — from a town that has just refused two smaller questions.
Funded for 1 year, then widening again at the same rate it was widening before — $10.94M short by FY39.
Salary settlements at 2% and health insurance at 4% instead of 9%
What it costsPay that rises more slowly than prices, bargained rather than decided; and plan changes families feel, until the cheaper plans run out and holding the rate means higher deductibles.
Funded in all 12 years, and it never reopens.
$145.91M of new taxable commercial value every year — about 49 developments a year, sustained, for ever
What it costs5.2× what the town actually builds, and about 95% of its entire existing commercial base — added again every year, with the traffic and services that come with it.
Funded in all 12 years, and it never reopens.
What all of it adds up to
Every route above is paid for by somebody: a child who loses a season, a household that pays $268 more a year for ever, an employee whose scale rises more slowly than prices, a family on a leaner health plan, a town with 49 more developments a year in it. None of that is an argument against any of them. It is the argument against waiting for the one that costs nothing, because there isn’t one.
Including the option nobody proposes
Doing nothing has a price too, and the town is already paying it. Leave insurance rising at 9% and the bargained increase where it is, and what is left for the whole salary line is 0.00% a year — less than the agreement it already signed. The district meets the difference by employing fewer people: about 6.0 positions in the first year, and more every year after, which is 54% of the workforce over twenty. Nobody ever votes for that total. It arrives one unfilled post at a time.
And no single lever does it. Every one of the 12 combinations that actually keeps the gap shut moves at least two lines at once — which is the one piece of good news here, because a price split between two or three parties is a fraction of a price paid by one. The cheapest of them asks a ballot question of about $7 a year on the average home, against the $507 the town turned down in May.
The working · eleven steps
Eleven steps, in order, assuming you know nothing about the budget. Each one answers a single question, corrects one thing people believe, and hands you one sentence. You can stop after any of them and the thing you took away will still be true.
Two things have happened, and they are matters of record. Two override questions went to the ballot and both were defeated. And the FY27 budget the town is running on right now cut 9.2 positions and $1,174,933.
Nothing about FY28 has been decided or announced. No committee has published a figure and no meeting has argued about one. The $680,870 below is not a number somebody handed the town — it is what this projection produces by running the district’s own published growth rates forward one year, and the next ten rooms are the working.
Which is the reason to read it now rather than in January. Everything in the record column already happened. Everything in the projection column is still a choice.
On the record — this already happened
Projected — nobody has announced this
$681k
what FY28 is short, on this model’s arithmetic[16]
What this year’s budget already cut
9.2 FTE · $1,174,933
16 lines in all. These are the ones that were somebody’s job.
A further 8.5 FTE and $745,674 was asked for and never funded — a cut by another name. This is the FY27 budget the town is running on now; earlier years are not in this model.
That list matters before anything else does. The rest of this explains why a hole opens again anyway — which is a different question from whether anybody tried.
You leave knowing
The town has already given real things up, and the next round has not started. This is what the arithmetic says is coming before anybody announces it.
Corrects“The schools keep asking for more.”
Everything here turns on one phrase that budget documents use and nobody explains. Level service means the same staff, the same buses, the same buildings, the same 1,581 children. Nobody is hired. Nothing is added. No program comes back.
What standing still costs
This is the school budget’s cost of living, and no committee voted for it. Salaries rise under an agreement signed in 2024. Health insurance rises because the insurance market says so. Out-of-district special education rises at rates the state sets.
You leave knowing
The ask is not for more schooling. It is for the same schooling at next year’s prices.
Corrects“The town is choosing not to fund the schools.”
Proposition 2½ — a 1980 statewide ballot question — caps how much more a town may collect at 2.5% a year. New growth, state aid and local receipts top that up to about 3.05%. That is the whole increase.
Where the $822k comes from
$459,808
What Proposition 2½ allows on the existing base
$215,533
New construction added to the levy, at the assumed rate
$127,984
Chapter 70 and the rest, at 2.0%
$18,902
Fees, excise, permits
And the fact that reframes the argument: 2½% was never indexed to what municipal costs actually do. It is a number chosen in 1980. Health insurance did not agree to it.
You leave knowing
The limit is a law from 1980, not a decision by anybody currently in the room.
Corrects“There must be waste in there somewhere.”
Now the projected figure from room one stops being asserted and starts being derived. Put the increase on the table as a fixed quantity, and let each cost line take its bite in the order it takes it.
The increase for next year
$822k
The town gave the schools $26,922,288 this year. Town revenue rises 3.05%, so next year it can give $822,228 more than it did. That is the entire increase.
What standing still costs
$1.40M
What the same staff, the same buses and the same buildings cost next year, one year older. Nobody is hired and nothing is added.
Next year’s gap
$681k
$577,148 of it is costs outrunning the increase — standing still takes 170% of it. The other $103,724 is what the district was already behind before anything grew.
The full width is what next year costs if nothing changes. The top band is who wants the money; the band underneath is the same span colored only by whether there is money for it. The mark is where it runs out. Everything past the mark has to come from somewhere else, and no rearranging of the segments makes it fit. This bar is about the increase only — next year’s full gap is $680,870, because the district also starts $103,724 behind.
| Line | Grows | Costs more | Share of the increase | Running |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Salaries | 4.0% | +$536,387 | 65% | 65% |
| Health insurance | 9.0% | +$361,716 | 44% | 109% |
| Special education, in district | 6.5% | +$354,633 | 43% | 152% |
| Transportation | 6.0% | +$63,202 | 8% | 160% |
| Everything else | 3.0% | +$53,162 | 6% | 167% |
| Utilities | 5.0% | +$30,276 | 4% | 170% |
| Out-of-district special education | 0.0% | +$0 | 0% | 170% |
| All six | +$1,399,376 | 170% |
Health insurance alone takes 44% of the increase while being 15% of the budget. Salaries take 65% on their own. By the third line the money has run out, and there are three more lines. Nothing in this table is new spending — it is the same staff, the same buses and the same buildings, a year older.
The bar above shows the money runs out, but a large line takes a large share of any increase and looks guilty simply for being large. So here is each line on its own, drawn the same way.
■ Green is growth the increase pays for — up to 3.04%, the rate every line could grow at if the $822k were exactly used up. ■ Red is what the line takes above that, which has to come from somewhere else. The tick is where the money for that line runs out.
Salaries have the longest bar and health insurance has the reddest one. That is the difference between costing a lot and being the problem: salaries take 1.31× their share because of their share of the budget, while health insurance takes 2.96× theirs and is 41% of the whole shortfall on its own.
One line out of six fits, and it fits by $21,301. It is “everything else” — supplies, materials, technology, athletics, clubs — the only line the School Committee fully controls, the only one it has actually been cutting, and the only one that was never the problem. The red segments add up to $577,148 — exactly the part of next year’s $680,870 gap that comes from costs outrunning the increase.
Proposition 2½ is the largest piece but not the whole of it. The schools take their share of whatever the town collects.
What Proposition 2½ allows on the existing base
New construction added to the levy, at the assumed rate
Chapter 70 and the rest, at 2.0%
Fees, excise, permits
Before anything grows, the district is already spending $103,724 more than it was appropriated this year — the special town meeting add-backs cost more than the special town meeting funded.
The same $680,870 the rest of this site starts from, rebuilt from the increase rather than from the total.
You leave knowing
The deficit is a subtraction, and you have now watched it being done.
Corrects“Salaries are eating the budget” — the biggest line looks guiltiest, and is not.
That last chart is the fair version of the question, and it is worth staying with for a moment. Salaries take more of the increase than anything else because they are 50% of the budget. Health insurance takes almost three times its share on 15% of it.
And the only line that fits is “everything else” — supplies, materials, technology, athletics, clubs. The one line the School Committee fully controls. Both things are true at once: the district has cut deeply, including 9.2 positions in the budget it is running on now, and the line it fully controls is the one already living within its means.
You leave knowing
The lines that overrun are not the lines anybody in Lunenburg sets. The line that fits is the only one they do.
Corrects“We just cut. Why is there a hole again?”
The budget Lunenburg is running on right now cut 9.2 positions and $1,174,933 — four classroom teachers, an interventionist and a half, an assistant principal, a custodian, half the athletic trainer. Next year the schools are projected short $680,870.
The town is living inside this experiment right now. The painful thing has been done, and a bigger hole opens the year after it. What follows is why.
Costs compound at 5.18% a year. Revenue compounds at 3.05%, drifting toward 2.5% as a flat new-growth figure becomes a smaller share of a bigger town. Two things compounding at different speeds pull apart for ever, and the distance between them grows on its own whether or not anybody does anything wrong.
Try it. Tick every box in the left column — every sport, the band, the clubs, most of technology, every administrator the law allows. Watch the growth rate underneath that column refuse to move, and watch the year squares go green and then red again. Then drag one rate on the right instead.
Still widening — $641,433 bigger in FY29 than in FY28
Costs grow 5.18%. Revenue grows 3.05% today, but that decays to 2.87% by FY39 as a flat new-growth figure becomes a smaller share of a bigger town — so 2.87% is the rate that actually has to be beaten. While it is not, the hole grows every year no matter what you take out of it, and every one-time fix buys about twelve months.
One-time fixes
These change the amount. Take all of them and watch the number at the bottom of this column stay exactly where it is.
Each notch is the smallest override that funds through one more year, given everything else set on this page. Cut something first and they all get smaller.
A school-only question, so the schools keep every dollar. The townwide ask that failed covered every department, which is why it had to be so much larger to do the same work here.
Within the 5–7% the Town measures itself against. $3,354,370 retained, out of the $3,354,370 certified this year.
About 24% — $794,872 a year — can be redirected while staying inside the guideline. Assumes the town keeps certifying at this year's level, which was a record: an ordinary year produces $2,026,212, or 3.96% — already below the floor, with nothing to redirect at all.
Found once: $0
Cost growth rate: 5.18% — unchanged by anything in this column
Growth rates
These change the direction. The number beside each line is how much of the budget it is — that, not the rate, decides how much moving it is worth.
Holding it to 2.5% moves the blend 0.74 pts · Bargained with the unions, three years at a time
Holding it to 2.5% moves the blend 0.97 pts · The Town buys the insurance, not the school district
Holding it to 2.5% moves the blend 0.81 pts · Each child’s plan, and the law behind it
Holding it to 2.5% moves the blend 0.14 pts · Contracted, and exposed to fuel
Holding it to 2.5% moves the blend -0.06 pts · Set by state rates and by which children enroll
Holding it to 2.5% moves the blend 0.06 pts · The market, and the weather
Holding it to 2.5% moves the blend 0.03 pts · The School Committee, mostly
The only revenue rate the town owns. The levy itself is locked at 2.5% by Proposition 2½ and no vote here changes that.
Cost growth rate: 5.18% vs revenue at 3.05% today, 2.87% long-run
You leave knowing
Cuts change the amount. Only rates change the direction. This year’s cut was never going to stop next year’s hole.
Corrects“Cut the administrators.” · “Cut sports before you cut classrooms.”
This room owes you a straight answer about the two cuts people feel most, and it is not going to flinch. Every remaining sport — 25 of them, 691 student-seasons, every coach — is $217,908. Every administrative and office line the law allows the district to cut is $736,468.
| What you do | Worth | Years it funds | Effect on the rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cut every remaining sport | $217,908 | 0 | none |
| Raise all three user fees to their ceilings | $345,997 | 0 | none |
| Cut every administrative line the law allows | $736,468 | 1 | none |
| Cut everything nameable, all at once | $1,495,880 | 2 | none |
| Pass one school override | $1,290,051 | 2 | none |
| Hold health insurance to 4% instead of 9% | $200,954 | — | 0.74 of 2.12 points |
| Settle salaries at 2½% instead of 4% | $201,145 | — | 0.74 of 2.12 points |
The last column is the whole page. Everything the town actually argues about sits in the rows that say none, and the two rows that change anything are the two nobody is arguing about.
The two cheapest-looking rows are the only two that change anything, and the loudest argument in town is worth nothing structurally at all.
Try it. Pick a number you think the town should find, and see what every lever would have to do to raise it — and how many of them cannot, at any price.
$500,000 is roughly where this lands in FY28. Of the 12 levers anyone has proposed, 6 can produce it on their own. The other 6 cannot, at any price, in any year.
No program ends and no job goes — but see what is actually in it
Cut administration and school office staff
6 people's jobs
Largest salaries first — 6 FTE, every one of them somebody doing a job today
Ceiling $736k. The rest of administration is roles the Commonwealth requires a district to have.
Check it: 6 lines totaling $509,360, largest first
Cut software, licenses and student devices
Not possible — 60% of it is $383k
Cutting technology to the bone leaves you $117k short
Gets you 77% of the way. Past 60% the state testing, IEP and payroll systems stop running.
Check it: 60% of $638,675 of technology spend is $383,205
User fees. The only lever the district can pull without the Town, a union or a ballot
Raise athletics fees
Not possible — the most it can ever raise is $158k
Even at the highest fee that raises anything, you are $342k short
Gets you 32% of the way. A fee may not lawfully raise more than the program costs.
Check it: $158,007 is everything above today's $390
Charge for band, music and clubs
Not possible — the most it can ever raise is $106k
Even at the highest fee that raises anything, you are $394k short
Gets you 21% of the way. A fee may not lawfully raise more than the program costs.
Check it: $106,244 is everything above today's $0
Raise bus fares
Not possible — the most it can ever raise is $82k
Even at the highest fee that raises anything, you are $418k short
Gets you 16% of the way. Past this fee, enough riders quit that the money goes down, not up.
Check it: $81,746 is everything above today's $180
Something students have today stops existing
Cut athletics — every remaining sport
Not possible — everything still funded is $218k
691 student-seasons across 25 sports, every coach, and the 1.5 jobs that run them — all of it gone, and you are still $282k short
Gets you 44% of the way. Transportation, half the trainer and middle school sports are already gone — the same money cannot be cut twice.
This is the same money as the first line inside “cut programs” beside it — the two cards overlap, so do not add them together. Athletics also collects about $187,451 in fees today, which stops being collected the moment the sports stop; how that revenue is accounted against this line is not published.
Check it: $451,830 of athletics, less the $233,922 the adopted FY27 budget already cut = $217,908 still being paid for
Cut programs, in the order the district already cuts them
7 programs and 2.9 jobs
Taken lowest-priority first, in the order the School Committee's own budgets have been cutting things:
Ceiling $3.56M. What remains is special education and other services required by law.
The first line is athletics, which also has a card of its own. Same money counted once, shown twice — do not add the two cards together.
Check it: 7 lines totaling $641,523 — the nearest you can land without cutting a fraction of a teacher
Bargained, every one of them, and a pay cut in everything but name
Move health premium onto employees
Employees pay 37.5% instead of 25%
About $5,496 a year out of a school employee's pay
Ceiling $600k. Beyond about 40% the plan stops being competitive and the town cannot hire.
Check it: $500,000 ÷ $39,985 kept per point = 12.5 points
Cut everyone’s pay
3.7% off every salary in the district
$2,701 a year from a teacher at the middle of the scale, and a bargaining fight for each of roughly 250 employees
Check it: $500,000 ÷ $13,409,674 of payroll = 3.7%
Nothing is cut; the bill goes up instead
Vote to raise taxes
$104 a year on the average home
$9 a month, on a bill of $7,444 — and it needs a townwide majority, which the last two asks did not get
Check it: $500,000 spread over $2.49 billion of property = $0.20 per $1,000 of value
Nobody pays and nothing is cut — the place becomes something else
Build commercial development
$64.48M of new commercial value, built every year
About 21 developments a year — one every 17 days, forever, against 6 recent years averaging $382k of new growth
Check it: $500,000 ÷ 54¢ the schools keep per dollar = $927,930 of new growth ÷ $14.39 per $1,000
Build housing
No number of homes raises it
The average home pays $3,959 a year toward schools and brings $3,961 of school cost with it, at 2.75 homes per pupil. Housing grows the town; it does not close this.
Check it: $517,296 × $14.39/$1,000 × 53% to schools = $3,959 vs $10,894 ÷ 2.75
You leave knowing
Athletics is a third of one year and none of the problem. That is not an argument for cutting it. It is an argument that cutting it was never the answer.
Corrects“An override would fix this” · “Overrides are just the schools coming back again.”
Both sides of this argument are wrong in the same way: they think an override is a payment. It is a permanent lift to the town’s levy limit, which then compounds at 2.5% like the rest of the limit. Three things follow, and two of them are good news nobody has told the town.
The two nobody mentions
54¢
what the schools keep of a town-wide override dollar — a school-only question keeps all of it
$1.29M
a school question covering two years, at $268 on the average home
$3.34M
and five years, at $694 — but see what it over-collects
The two questions Lunenburg put up and lost were town-wide, covering every department. Written for the schools alone, the same money does nearly twice the work here.
An override is not a one-off payment. It raises the levy limit permanently and compounds at 2½% a year like the rest of it, so a large enough one really does cover years rather than a year. This is what each length costs.
| To cover | Through | The ballot questionvoted in FY28 | Worth by thenafter compounding at 2½% | That year’s gap | On the average home, every year | Extra collected next yearabove the $680,870 the schools are short in FY28 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 year | FY28 | $680,870 | $680,870 | $680,870 | $141 | — |
| 2 years | FY29 | $1,290,051 | $1,322,302 | $1,322,303 | $268 | $609,181 |
| 3 years | FY30 | $1,935,208 | $2,033,178 | $2,033,179 | $402 | $1,254,338 |
| 5 years | FY32 | $3,339,269 | $3,685,928 | $3,685,928 | $694 | $2,658,399 |
| 8 years | FY35 | $5,754,009 | $6,839,709 | $6,839,710 | $1196 | $5,073,139 |
| 10 years | FY37 | $7,590,909 | $9,480,005 | $9,480,005 | $1577 | $6,910,039 |
Why $3.34M covers a $3.69M gap. Because $3,339,269 is what the ballot says in FY28, not what it delivers in FY32. The levy limit it lifted compounds at 2½% like the rest of the limit, so by FY32 that same override is handing the schools $3,685,928 — which is FY32’s gap to the dollar. Read the last two columns of any row and they match; that is the sizing rule, not a coincidence.
Run the model at exactly $3,339,269 and FY32 lands with nothing to spare. Two thousand dollars less and it fails.
One $3.34M override, across its own five years
The column above is next year only: pick a row, and that is how much more than the $680,870 shortfall it would collect in FY28. This is the other direction — one override followed through its own five years. It collects most above the need in its first year and least in its last, because the gap grows into it.
FY28
$2.66M
over-collected
FY29
$2.10M
over-collected
FY30
$1.48M
over-collected
FY31
$777k
over-collected
FY32
exactly enough
nothing spare
The surplus is a prepayment, not a windfall. Take the two-year question. It has to reach $1,322,303 by FY29, and compounding carries it from $1,290,051 to there — a gain of $32,251. But the gap grows $641,433 over that same year. So compounding supplies 5% of what is needed and the other 95% has to be collected a year early, before anybody needs it. That is what the $609,181 is.
And this is where the long options die. To be exactly enough in its last year, an override has to be far too much in its first. The five-year question collects $2,658,399 more than the schools need next April, falling to nothing by FY32 as the gap catches up — $7,010,959 over-collected across the five years altogether. “Tax yourselves $2.66M more than the schools are short” is not a ballot question anybody writes, which is the practical reason these rows are not the plan they look like.
There is one way out of it, and it is the reason it matters that an override raises a ceiling rather than a bill. The town can pass the larger question and then levy under the limit in the early years — taking what the schools actually need and leaving the rest uncollected until the gap grows into it. Lunenburg has left capacity unlevied before, though never on this scale. It asks voters to approve a number far larger than the one they will be charged, and to trust that the difference stays uncollected.
Each extra year costs more than the last: the override compounds at 2½% and the gap compounds at nearly 5% from a base that is already bigger. The two rates never cross, so no override of any size holds forever — buying a decade costs $1,577 a year on the average home, and FY38 arrives anyway. That is the same rate problem the rest of this page is about, met from the revenue side.
Try it. Each notch is the smallest override that funds one more year. Watch the ballot figure, the tax bill and the over-collection move together — they are three views of one decision.
Move the override
Funds through FY29 — 2 years
$1,291,000
on the ballot — $268 a year on the average home, every year, permanently
Collects $610,130 more than the schools are short next April, falling to nothing by FY29 as the gap grows into it. That surplus is the price of buying more than one year at a time.
And the alternative to one big question: a smaller one, every spring, for ever.
| Year | School-only ballot | On the average home | If it were townwide |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY28 | $680,870 | $141 | $1,263,599 · $263 |
| FY29 | $620,773 | $129 | $1,152,067 · $239 |
| FY30 | $671,004 | $139 | $1,245,289 · $259 |
| FY31 | $724,943 | $151 | $1,345,392 · $280 |
| FY32 | $782,883 | $163 | $1,452,921 · $302 |
| FY33 | $845,141 | $176 | $1,568,463 · $326 |
| Six years | +$899 a year |
These are smaller than the year-on-year growth in the gap shown earlier, and deliberately so: last year’s override is still there and has itself grown 2½%, so each row is only the new money needed on top of it.
Each row is a separate vote, and each one is permanent — the tax column accumulates. A school-only question gives the schools every dollar it raises. The last column is the same job done by a general override covering all departments: it has to be nearly twice the size, and costs the average homeowner nearly twice as much, to leave the schools in the same place. That is the shape of the ask Lunenburg put on the ballot and lost.
You leave knowing
An override is not one vote. It is either a smaller one every spring for ever, or a very large one whose first years collect far more than the schools need.
Corrects“Commercial development will grow us out of this.”
The right instinct, priced honestly. Two facts do all the work here, and neither is in general circulation.
On the wall
What one “development” means here
The model’s unit is $3,005,000 of new assessed value — a mix, not one building type, because that is what actually gets built. So 30 a year is, in real buildings:
That is 258 new commercial buildings over five years. Lunenburg has 234 commercial properties today, worth $153.97M in total — accumulated over the whole life of the town. This asks for very nearly that many again, in five years, one every 12 days.
It would take commercial property from 7% of the town’s value to 24%. And it has somewhere to go or it does not happen: commercial development clusters where municipal sewer reaches, which is why the same three corridors come up in every economic development conversation.
The first is that the schools keep 54¢ of each new-growth dollar. New growth goes to the town’s levy, and the schools get their share of what the town collects. Pricing development against the school gap without that roughly doubles what a new development appears to be worth.
The second has not been said out loud anywhere in town: a flat build rate decays as a rate. A fixed number of dollars of new growth each year is a shrinking share of a growing town, which is exactly why 3.05% drifts back toward 2.5%. To work as a rate rather than as a one-off, the rate of new commercial construction has to keep rising.
And the housing half, which settles a separate argument: the average home pays about $3,959 a year toward schools and brings about $3,961 of school cost with it. Housing grows the town. It does not close this.
You leave knowing
Commercial development is real money and the wrong order of magnitude — and it has to accelerate, not merely continue.
Corrects“Fix Chapter 70 and we’re fine.”
The one route where nobody in Lunenburg gives anything up, so it deserves a number rather than a wish. First untangle two figures that get conflated constantly: all state aid is $11.88M, and Chapter 70 school aid is $9.35M of it.
On the wall
The reason the rate has to be so steep is that aid is only 24% of what the town collects. Fixing a 5.18% cost rate by moving a quarter of the revenue means moving that quarter very hard.
And the fact that should shape the ask: the town already spends $3.48M above its foundation budget, which is not where the formula sends money. Worth knowing before writing the letter, because it tells you what to ask for.
You leave knowing
Worth asking the delegation for. Not worth planning around.
Corrects“There must be a version of this where nobody gets hurt.”
Permanent balance has exactly one condition: everything the district buys has to grow no faster than 2.69% a year, which is where the town’s revenue settles once a flat new-growth figure has finished shrinking as a share.
Four of the six lines are fixed by contract, state law or the market. So salaries are the residual, and the honest question is not whether the town can hold them to a number, but what is left for them once insurance has taken its share.
Start with the version of that nobody has to agree to, because it is the one already happening. Leave insurance where it is, leave the bargained increase where it is, and hold the salary line down by employing fewer people:
The default — what happens if nobody decides anything
That is not a recommendation. It is what the arithmetic does on its own when nobody chooses: every position left unfilled is an instalment on it, and the town has been paying them for years without ever voting for the total. It appears below as option five of seven, priced beside the rest rather than standing on its own — and the last figure above is the reason it is not the only option. What insurance does decides what is left for salaries.
So the one condition sounds like a single locked door, and it is not. There are 12 combinations that actually keep the gap shut — for five years, for ten, for a generation, and 3 that never reopen at all — and none of them pulls a single lever. The cheapest of them costs an override of about $7 a year on the average home, against the $507 one the town turned down.
Each one names the rates it needs, the four interchangeable ways to cover the first years — build, one override, user fees, or one permanent cut — and who has to say yes. That is more arithmetic than a room can hold, so it has a page of its own.
What “solved” would actually require
12 priced combinations, why every one of them moves at least two lines, what a moderate result at the State House is worth to each, and the table they were all drawn from. Any of them can be loaded straight into the curve or the budget builder.
You leave knowing
There is no painless version, and there are several that work. Five quiet years is a smaller ask than thirty; every one of them moves both salaries and insurance; and the packages that share the change cost a fraction of the ones that spare either side.
The way out
LinkIt is between funding next April and being back here in twelve months, or changing one of two rates that nobody in this town sets alone — a health insurance contract the Town buys, and an agreement bargained three years at a time. Everything else on this site is a way of checking that for yourself.
The staff reductions in room one are the FY27 cycle, which is what this model records. If there were cuts in earlier years they are not here, and a multi-year count would be the most persuasive figure on this page.
Citations
Each number on this page carries a marker. Every document below can be downloaded in full — not a summary of it, the file itself.
On budgets versus actuals. Every projection on this site is computed from budget columns — what was voted or proposed — never from actual spending. The two are different quantities and mixing them produces a growth rate that is partly growth and partly the difference between them.
The FY27 school budget
Total, Balanced scenario
Published figureFY27 proposed budget document, 25 March 2026sources/district-budget/docs/final-budget-document.pdf
What the schools spend, by line
column fy27_balanced — the adopted budget, not actual spending
Budget documentFY27 budget workbook, 25 March 2026sources/budget-workbooks/fy27-proposals.xlsx
Positions cut from the budget now in force
The district’s own Scenario D reduction list, plus the program lines the workbook shows falling between Level Service and Balanced. Two items make up the difference from the addendum’s own subtotal: Middle School custodial hours ($9,661, from the workbook) and the 0.2 Music Teacher at Turkey Hill ($14,488) — the district listed that post with no dollar figure, so the amount is OURS, priced from the high school music position.
Published figureMulti-Scenario Financial Analysis, §5, with the FY27 workbooksources/district-budget/docs/budget-addendum-multi-scenario-financial-analysis.pdf
Override questions passed, and what they would have cost
Precinct tallies; tax impact from the Town Manager
Published figureTown election results, 16 May 2026sources/town-supplementary/docs/town-2026-election-unofficial-results.pdf
Revenue: levy limit, new growth, excluded debt, state aid
The revenue formula as the Town published it
Published figureTown Manager's FY27 budget release, 17 April 2026sources/town-budget/docs/4090-click-here-for-a-release-on-quot-understanding-lunenburg-apos-s-fy27-budget-how-.pdf
Proposition 2½ levy growth
Massachusetts General Laws c.59 §21C
Set by lawFinance Committee deck on Proposition 2½sources/town-budget/docs/1591-town-revenue-amp-proposition-2-5-presentation.pdf
Salary growth
2.5 / 4.0 / 3.5% scale increases plus steps worth ~3.3%
Signed agreementLunenburg Education Association agreement, FY25–FY27sources/contracts/pdf/dese-teacher-contract.pdf
Health insurance growth
The district's own stated FY27 assumption
Published figureHealth Insurance Rates July 1, 2026 (Town of Lunenburg), and the FY27 budget narrativesources/town-supplementary/docs/health-insurance-rates-2025.pdf
Out-of-district special education growth
OURS, and the absence of a rate is the finding. The district publishes no escalator for this line, and the archive reaches back far enough to ask what it has actually done: 11 budgets from FY17 to FY27, ranging from $489,918 to $1,291,293 — a factor of 2.64 — with 6 years up and 4 down. A straight line through them has an R² of 0.10, and the compound rate to FY27 runs from -45.8% to +11.8% depending only on which year you start it. A figure that moves that far on the choice of a start year measures nothing, so the line is held flat and the risk is published as a range of priced scenarios instead. This replaces an 8% escalator that had no stated basis at all. The series is drawn from the district’s own budget documents, one budget stage held constant throughout, and three of its years reproduce the FY27 workbook exactly.
Our projectionThe district’s budget documents FY17–FY27, extracted by scripts/extract_tuition_history.py/data/ood-tuition-history.csvsources/budget-workbooks/fy27-proposals.xlsx
Special education growth, in district
OURS. Every part of this line is escalated at what its own budgets show it doing, measured across eight to ten years of them, weighted by its share of the line: professional staff 2.7% across 53%, paraprofessionals 12.8% across 34%, transport 5.7% across 12%. Not one of those is a contract rate, and the two that have contracts show why. Special education teachers are on an agreement giving 3.5% and their line has grown 2.67% across 8 budgets — below it, because headcount there has drifted down. The paras run the other way: their contract gives 2.0%; across 10 budgets, FY18 to FY27, the line went from $634,513 to $1,872,411 — 2.95 times, 8 of 9 years up, an R² of 0.89, and a compound rate that stays between +11.5% and +17.0% wherever you start it. That is headcount, and no pay settlement reaches it. A contract sets what one person is paid. It says nothing about how many people are employed, and on this line that is where the movement is — in both directions. This figure has previously stood at 2.48%, 4.28% and 6.80%; each was built on fewer budget years than the archive turned out to hold. What it still assumes is that the climb continues at roughly the rate it has held. A budget column cannot test that by itself — it shows dollars per line and never people. Two headcount sources exist and neither closes it: DESE publishes paraprofessional FTE per district per year, without classification or school, and the town prints per-school staff rosters by name and position in every annual report, FY2011–FY2025, without any FTE at all — published at /api/staff_roster_entries and /data/staff-roster-counts.csv A count of names is not a staffing level. The full range is published beside the rate.
Our projectionFY27 budget workbook with the district’s budget documents FY17–FY27, extracted by scripts/extract_budget_history.py/data/sped-para-history.csvsources/budget-workbooks/fy27-proposals.xlsx
Chapter 70 aid and the foundation budget
DESE preliminary FY27 Chapter 70
Published figureDESE Chapter 70 summary, FY27sources/budget-workbooks/ch70-fy27-summary.xlsx
New growth, assessed value by class, average tax bill
The Assessors' own year-by-year tables
Published figureTax Classification Hearing, FY2023sources/town-budget/docs/tax-classification-fy23.pdf
What each sport costs, and how many play it
Cost and participation per sport, FY24
Published figureAthletic program costs by sportsources/district-budget/docs/athletic-program-costs-by-sport.pdf
What families pay in athletic and bus fees
Superintendent's email, August 2026; prior schedule from the FAQ
Published figureHigh school athletics fee schedulesources/district-budget/docs/lhs-athletics-faq.pdf
How neighboring districts compare
In-district expenditure per pupil, FY2018–FY2024
Published figureDESE per-pupil expendituressources/budget-workbooks/dese-all-districts.xlsx
The projected FY28 gap
Computed from the FY27 adopted budget and the growth rates above. There is no FY28 budget yet — that work starts in January 2027.
Our projectionBuilt by this project from the FY27 budget workbooksources/budget-workbooks/fy27-proposals.xlsx