What a family actually pays

“A slideshow presentation of athletic user fees is presented to increase fee for high school up to $325 and $275 for Middle School. A 25% discount for siblings. Reduced fee for high school to $50 and $40 for middle school with a family cap of $1500.”

School Committee, moved and approved by roll call · School Committee, 2025-02-26 · the text we hold · the town’s copy

The whole of what any document in this archive says about the family cap. It is one sentence, it names an amount, and it names no period. Everything on this page about the cap runs off this sentence and the one it replaced.

“As far as the student activities is concerned, when I looked at the list, I personally participate in 6 of them. That would cost $450 which is more than any of the athletic fees were raised.”

Kara Harunkiewicz, in public comment at the same meeting · School Committee, 2025-02-26 · the text we hold · the town’s copy

Said in the room where the athletic fees were voted, and it is the point this page is built to test: athletics is the fee everybody argues about and it is not the only one a family pays. The $450 is a resident’s own arithmetic on a list of activities, at the same meeting where the activity fee was discussed and NOT voted — which is why this archive holds no activity fee schedule to check it against.

“The fee for 1 child is $180 and the family cap is $270 for the year.”

the Finance Committee, on the bus fee set eight days earlier · Finance Committee, 2025-03-20 · the text we hold · the town’s copy

The same district, the same budget cycle, a family cap — and the period stated in so many words. Four weeks before this, the athletic cap was voted with no period at all. That does not establish what the athletic cap means. It does establish that stating the period is something the town does when it has one in mind, so the omission is not a convention of minute-taking.

“Athletic fees would need to be raised by $75 per student. This would generate $120,000.”

the Finance Committee, on the FY2027 budget · Finance Committee, 2026-03-26 · the text we hold · the town’s copy

A year later, the same fee is being modelled as a way to close a budget gap — so what a family pays is not a settled schedule but a live variable. Note the unit the town itself uses when it talks about the fee: PER STUDENT. Not per sport, not per season.

The $1,500 family cap was set by the School Committee on 26 February 2025 and the minutes state the amount and no period: "with a family cap of $1500". The cap it replaced did state one — the LHS Athletics FAQ prints "Total Cap per season=$475.00" — so the schedule has moved from a stated period to none. The district workbook obtained by records request carries the per-student rates on three worksheets named for the three seasons and carries no family cap in any cell, so the corroboration that dates the other rates does not reach this one. Read per season and read per year, $1,500 is a different bill for the same family. The arithmetic argues for the annual reading — with the published FY2027 ladder a family of five children playing one sport each in one season reaches $1,375, still under the cap — but that is an inference from the cap being unreachable, not a statement in any document.

Closes with: the district’s athletic fee schedule as published to families for 2026-27, which is the document the Superintendent’s August 2026 email to families attached or described.

The district’s RevTrak portal offers an Afterschool Activity Fee, a Chromebook Repair Fee, Extended Day & ELC, Field Trips, an LHS Parking Permit and a Primary Preschool Program. The portal renders in JavaScript and serves no amounts to a plain fetch, and no fee schedule for any of them appears in a budget book, a warrant or a set of minutes in this archive. So the existence of each fee is established and the amount of every one of them is not, and any total of what a Lunenburg family pays the schools in a year is a floor with six named items sitting above it.

Closes with: the district’s published schedule of student fees for the current year, listing every fee the portal charges with its amount.

The FY2027 schedule names a first, second and third child — $400, $300 and $225 — and stops. The FY2024 and FY2025 schedules did the same, and there the cap resolved it: the three published rates sum to exactly the $475 the FAQ prints as the cap, so a fourth child added nothing. That identity does not hold in FY2027, where the three rates sum to $925 against a $1,500 cap, so the fourth child is neither priced nor obviously free. A family of four children — the case residents ask about most often — therefore cannot be costed from anything published.

Closes with: the district’s athletic fee schedule as published to families for 2026-27, stating the rate for each additional child or the point at which the ladder stops.

The School Committee minutes of 26 February 2025 record the decision and not the derivation: "A slideshow presentation of athletic user fees is presented ... with a family cap of $1500. ... all approve via roll call vote". A slideshow WAS presented, so the arithmetic exists somewhere; this archive does not hold it, and the only athletics presentation material here is two Athletic Advisory Council agendas from the preceding weeks. Minutes summarise, so the absence of arithmetic in them is not evidence that there was none — what is established is that no document we hold derives the figure or states the period it covers. The figure itself is unreachable per season by family size alone: five children at one sport each come to between $1,220 and $1,375 depending on how the sibling discount is carried past the third child, both under $1,500.

Closes with: the athletic user fee presentation given to the School Committee on 26 February 2025, which is the slideshow the minutes name.

The only account this archive has of the 2026-27 athletic fees is a Superintendent’s email to families in August 2026 that we do not hold, reported as four figures: a first, second and third child and a family cap. FY2026 published more than that — a middle school rate, a reduced rate for high school and for middle school, and a sibling discount — and none of those has an FY2027 successor in any document here. So a middle school family, a family paying the reduced fee and a family whose fee is waived cannot be priced for the year now running.

Closes with: the district’s athletic fee schedule as published to families for 2026-27, in full, including the reduced and waived rates and the middle school schedule.

Two town documents give 593 and 649 for the same year and count different things: one counts fee categories, the other counts participations by sport, and a participation is not a child — one student playing three seasons is three of them. Some workbook rows are negative, subtracting out-of-district athletes back out, so a season total is a net figure rather than a headcount of bodies. Nothing published is an unduplicated count.

Closes with: an unduplicated athlete roster, or a participation report that states whether it counts students or participations.

charged by published policy · no destination found in any ledger