Analyses

Special education

Four questions. Three of them have an answer in this archive, the fourth has none — and they do not combine with each other.

lunenburgbudgetproject.org — written by the Lunenburg Budget Project, an independent tool for residents. Not affiliated with the Town of Lunenburg, the School Committee or the school district.

counts childrenHow many students are on an IEP →258FY26 · 16.3% of enrolmentThe count the state publishes, in district and out, with the one staffing figure in DESE’s file that reproduces from its own arithmetic — and the two that do not.counts children — with no disability flagDo children with an IEP leave at a different rate →noDESE publishes no disability status with the enrolment it publishesThe count of children who leave exists, is measured, and is a general figure — 177 of Lunenburg’s resident children are educated by another district, and DESE does not say which of them has a plan. So the special education version of this question has no answer here at all. The measurement itself is a report of its own, outside these four, because merged into a special education narrative “177 children left” becomes “177 special education children left” in one retelling.counts dollarsWhat it costs, and what comes back →$1,205,949FY25 out-of-district tuition, all funds · the budget line said $732,298Out-of-district tuition split by the fund that paid it, circuit breaker reimbursement from FY2006 to FY2026, and the check that establishes what the budget line actually is.counts placementsThe route out of district →36 of 198children who started in a substantially separate classroom and are now out of districtA cohort followed from where its placement started, the town’s own count back to FY2011, and the two published counts that do not always agree.

Why they are four and not one

Because each is measured in a different unit, by a different publisher, on a different census. A student is not a dollar. A placement is not a cost. A resident who transfers out is not established to have an individual education programme at all. The one arithmetic operation a reader will reach for — a cost per student — would take a numerator from one return and a denominator from another, and this project has already had to retract sentences built exactly that way.

So the four have four addresses, four payloads and no shared figure. Each states the unit it counts at the top, and each carries its own list of what it cannot answer. The single registry of those limits is what we cannot answer.

The parts of this that live elsewhere

Special education is roughly a quarter of the school budget on every basis this project has tested, so it turns up on pages that are not about it. Bend the curve carries the in-district escalator and the classification behind it — there is no account code for special education, so that classification is ours and it says so. When a grant ends measures the fund split on the paraprofessional function, which is the one thing that would settle whether the escalator is growth or grant money unwinding. If students leave is the school-choice SCENARIO, priced on an assumption; the report here is the measurement with no dials.