The One Big Report

258 Lunenburg children had a special education plan in FY2026, against 227 in FY2022 — and because the number of children in the schools fell over those years, the SHARE with a plan rose further than the number did. 31 more children, on an enrollment that went from 1,608 to 1,581. The share therefore moved from 14.1% to 16.3% — 2.2 points. Both halves of that matter to anyone reading a rising percentage as a rising caseload: the caseload did rise, and had enrollment held where it was the share would read 16.0% rather than 16.3%. These are DESE’s own published counts, not a percentage multiplied back out.

what it costs →

The state counts 18.0 full-time paraprofessionals in Lunenburg’s special education programme, down from 49.0 — a fall of 63.3%, while the number of children they support barely moved. For every hundred children with a special education plan that is 18.5 posts falling to 7.3, over a group of children that went from 265 to 246. Paraprofessionals are the staff this budget grows fastest in, and they are what this project’s own forecast of in-district special education costs is built on, so which way this series runs changes what anybody planning from it should expect. A full-time equivalent is a share of a post rather than a person: the state counts assignments, so two half-time posts and one full-time post are the same figure here.

the people the budget buys →

The special education figure residents argue about — what the schools pay other schools to teach children Lunenburg cannot — is the town’s share of that bill and not the bill. In FY2025 the budget said $732,298 and $1,205,949 was spent. The district’s own restated budget figure equals DESE’s general fund column, to within a dollar or two, in 11 of the 12 years the two can be compared — and equals the all-funds column in none of them. So $473,651, 39.3% of what was spent on out-of-district placement that year, was paid from funds that never appear in the appropriation at all. A resident watching the budget line is watching what the town raises, which can move without a single placement changing.

the money outside the budget → · what happens when a grant stops →

The state does reimburse out-of-district tuition, but it takes a threshold off before it pays anything — in FY2026 that threshold was $471,771. Lunenburg claimed $1,257,225 of eligible expense and was paid $579,142, which is 46.1% of the claim. That the threshold is a deduction rather than a rate is measured and not described: eligible expense minus threshold equals the net claim exactly in 13 of the 21 years the state has published. So the reimbursement grows as costs grow and never reaches the first slice of them, and the town carries that slice in every year whatever else happens.

Out-of-district tuition has not risen relentlessly. Measured across every fund it peaked at $2,094,813 in FY2015, and FY2025 came in at $1,205,949. That is 42.4% below the peak, and the series moves in both directions across the 17 years it covers — a low of $539,509 and a high of $2,094,813. What moves further than the total is who pays it: the share falling outside the appropriation has been as high as 70.3% and as low as 17.9%, so the line the town votes can rise in a year when spending falls. Out-of-district placement is a small number of children and the state’s own reimbursement threshold for FY2026 was $52,419 per child, so one family moving in or out moves this series more than any policy does. A single year of it means very little.

the placement count itself →

The town’s own count of children placed out of district for special education ran from 30 in FY2015 down to 7 in FY2023, and stood at 10 in FY2025. Lunenburg has printed this figure in the Special Services report of every annual town report since FY2011, sourced to SIMS Report 7 and measured on 1 March, split into collaborative, day and residential placements. It is the closest thing the town publishes to the quantity everybody argues about, and over 15 years it has moved in both directions rather than only upward. In FY2025 it was 6 collaborative, 3 day and 1 residential.

what it costs →

Where a child is taught to begin with tracks strongly with whether they end up at a school outside Lunenburg: 18.2% of the children who started in a separate special education classroom did, against 1.2% of those who started in an ordinary one. Added up over 9 groups the state follows, that is 36 children of 198 against 15 of 1,232. The counts are the figure and not the rate: a rate off a base of 28 moves by 3.6 points when one child does. This is the closest the published record comes to the question residents ask about early intervention, and it is worth having in front of anyone discussing in-district capacity — but see what it does not show, which is most of it.

Lunenburg’s entire increase in state school aid for FY2026 was the flat minimum the Legislature votes each year — $240,450, which is exactly $150 for each of the 1,603 pupils the state’s funding formula counts. The formula itself awarded $0. The formula pays foundation aid only where the foundation budget less the town’s required contribution exceeds last year’s aid. For FY2026 that is $22,073,946 less $13,334,631, or $8,739,315 of need, against $8,988,960 already being paid: Lunenburg sits $249,645 above the line at which the formula pays anything. It has been in that position in 4 of the last 5 years, and the floor the Legislature chose in those years was $30, $60, $104 and $150 a pupil. So what the town receives moves with a rate set on Beacon Hill each spring, not with anything its own costs or its own enrollment do.

all state aid, of which this is the largest part →

Since FY2019 the amount the state requires Lunenburg to pay towards its own schools has risen 37.8%, while the state aid it sends rose 22.4% — and over the same years the pupil count the formula runs on fell from 1,716 to 1,603. In dollars the required local contribution went from $9,678,671 to $13,334,631, up $3,655,960, while aid went from $7,538,072 to $9,229,410, up $1,691,338. Both are DESE’s published calculation for their own year, so the two are the same stage and can be compared. What it changes for a resident is where the foundation budget is paid from: the required local share of it was 72.3% in FY2007, fell to 56.1% by FY2018, and is 60.4% now. A school budget that grows is increasingly a town bill, and that shift happens whether or not the district changes anything it does.

what the town actually spends against that floor →

What the state requires Lunenburg to pay towards its own schools is worked out from property values and residents’ incomes, and has no pupil count in it at all — that holds in all 20 published years. Lunenburg’s equalized valuation rose 83.7% between FY2019 and FY2026, against a median of 69.8% across the 352 municipalities in DESE’s own table — rank 80, fastest first. Its combined effort yield, the sum of the two efforts, rose 59.3% against a median of 51.9%. This is why fewer children does not mean a smaller bill: the formula reads what the town is worth, not how many pupils it has. Foundation enrollment fell across those same years and the requirement rose $3,655,960.

the other district this one required contribution is split with →

Lunenburg’s slide down the state ranking since FY2018 is mostly the bar rising: the requirement went up 25.2% over those years while what the town spent went up 11.9%. Required net school spending rose $4,175,586 and what the town spent rose $2,559,676 — spending ends the period higher than it started and rose more slowly than the figure it is measured against. The rank went from 181 of 361 districts in FY2018 to 238 of 362 in FY2024, the weakest position since FY2005. The requirement is recomputed every year from enrollment and municipal wealth, so a district can spend more each year and still fall. And a fall that took 6 years is a different problem, with different remedies, from a condition that has held since the series began.

why the requirement itself keeps rising →

Spending like the middle district in Massachusetts would have meant FY2024 more than Lunenburg spent in $2,534,627 — 10.5% more, on a state minimum of $20,730,114. The median district spent 1.2821 times its required net school spending that year; Lunenburg spent 1.1598. Applying the median ratio to Lunenburg’s own requirement gives $26,578,079 against the $24,043,452 it actually spent. That is a subtraction on a published median and nothing more: nobody has proposed it and no programme is costed against it. It is here because a rank is hard to weigh at a meeting and a dollar amount is not.

the per-pupil comparison, which is a different measure →

Massachusetts sets a minimum every town must spend on its own schools. Lunenburg has met it in all 31 years measured, and in 14 of those years spent at or above what the middle district in the state spent. A district spending below its required net school spending is out of compliance. Lunenburg’s narrowest year was FY1996, at 1.0032 times the requirement. The story the town tells about itself is that it has always been a low spender, and against the measure the state enforces it has not been: it landed exactly on the state median in FY2018 — 1.2978 against a median of 1.2978 — and has been below the state’s first quartile in 2 of those years, FY1996 and FY2005. That is a real thing to know before any argument about what the schools are owed.

what districts spend for each pupil, which is a different measure → · the overrides the town has voted on →

145 of the 177 Lunenburg children educated outside Lunenburg Public Schools go to districts that spend more for each pupil than Lunenburg does — 12.0% more at Leominster, and 43.3% more at Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical. In FY2025 the widest is $25,827 a pupil against Lunenburg’s $18,027 — $7,800 more, which is 43.3% — and 54.8% of the leavers go there. The size of it depends enormously on which district: $720 more at Francis W. Parker Charter Essential (District), $1,900 at Sizer School: A North Central Charter Essential (District), $2,155 at Leominster, $4,687 at Fitchburg, $7,800 at Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical. Leominster is the nearest like-for-like comparison, an ordinary K-12 municipal district, at $20,182 a pupil, $2,155 more. The exception is the two Commonwealth virtual districts, 16 children between them, which spend less. The children are counted in FY2026 and the spending measured in FY2025: two collections, and nothing here is differenced across them.

the district that takes most of them, and how the town is billed for it → · where students go, year by year →

Lunenburg spends $18,027 a pupil, $5,493 below the statewide median, and it has been in the bottom quarter of Massachusetts districts in 17 of the 17 years the state publishes here. In FY2025 it ranks 310 of 318 districts, with 8 spending less, against a median of $23,520 and a middle half running $21,179 to $26,961. This is not the school budget and not what a household pays: DESE counts every fund — grants, revolving funds, school choice, gifts — and counts town-paid insurance and retirement attributed to the schools, so it is a larger figure than the appropriation Town Meeting votes. The distance between the two is two definitions, not hidden money.

what the state requires the town to spend → · the insurance DESE counts here and the school budget does not →

Most of the per-pupil gap between Lunenburg and its neighbours is the denominator. Spending grew within a narrow band across all six districts; enrollment did not. From FY2012 to FY2025 every one of the six raised spending by between 43.8% and 59.0%, and Lunenburg’s 48.7% sits inside that band. Pupil counts are what separate them: -5.6% here against -23.5% at North Middlesex. Give FY2025’s money to each district’s FY2012 pupil count and Lunenburg is $17,025 a pupil, 5 of 6 rather than last, and North Middlesex is last. A neighbour’s higher per-pupil figure is in large part fewer children rather than more money.

what happens when students leave →

Lunenburg pays near the top of this group for a teacher and employs the fewest of them for each pupil: $97,233 on average, and 6.7 teachers for every hundred in-district pupils. Harvard’s average is the highest at $99,136 and Ashburnham-Westminster’s the lowest at $84,724; Lunenburg ranks 2 of 6 on pay and 6 of 6 on teachers for each pupil, where the next lowest is 7.4 and the highest is 8.5. Teaching salaries reach $6,513 a pupil here against $8,475 at Harvard — close to the same money for each teacher, spread across more children.

the people the budget buys →

When the grant money ran out in FY2025 the town replaced under half of it: of $2,670,158 of grant funding that fell, across 16 areas of school spending, $1,127,647 fell where the town’s own money rose to meet it and $1,542,511 fell where nothing did. In the 8 functions where the two moved opposite ways the general fund rose $1,136,013. In the other 8, grants fell and the general fund fell a further $606,553 on top of them. So the year is a handover and a reduction happening at once, and “the town picked up the bill for the grants” describes 42.2% of the money. A function where the general fund rose is also not a function that was made whole: the rise is what the town raised, not what the work cost.

the money that never reaches the vote → · the lines the book took to zero →

The largest rise in the town’s own school spending in FY2025 was not a grant ending. It was Insurance for Active Employees, up $3,026,556 — more than the whole year’s net fall in grant funding of $2,023,188. Nothing in the handover explains it: grant funding against that function did not fall, it rose $179,646 in the same year. And across the 27 functions where grants did not fall at all, the general fund rose $1,470,167 net — a larger movement than the handover. The end of the grants is real and it is not the biggest thing that happened to what Lunenburg raises for its schools that year.

what health insurance costs the town → · where the pressure actually sits →

Money from outside the town’s budget — grants and the like — used to pay nearly one dollar in five of what Lunenburg schools spend, and now pays about one in ten. The town’s own share went from 81.5% in FY2009 to 89.9% in FY2025. That is 8.4 points, and at FY2025 spending it is worth $2,520,227 a year: had the split stayed where it was in FY2009 the general fund would have carried $24,466,117 rather than $26,986,344. That last figure is arithmetic of ours and a counterfactual, not a forecast — but it is the size of the shift a household is paying for, and it is why the town’s bill can rise in a year when the schools spend less. In FY2025 the general fund rose $1,999,627 while spending across both funds fell $23,561.

the aid the town does not set → · the funds outside the appropriation →

Paraprofessionals are the biggest change in who Lunenburg’s schools employ: the state’s count went from 0.94 per hundred pupils in FY2013, the lowest of the 13 districts on the state’s own sheet, to 4.27 in FY2025, the highest. 14.8 full-time equivalents in FY2013 and 67.0 in FY2025 — a rise of 352.7% over years in which in-district enrolment fell 0.8%. Nothing else in this archive could have told a resident that: the town prints staff rosters every year and they carry names without hours, so the state’s file is the only place the size of the shift is visible.

what special education costs → · what other districts spend →

Lunenburg ranks 12 of the 13 districts on the state’s comparison sheet for teachers per pupil — and falling enrolment is not the explanation: teacher FTE fell 12.6% since FY2009 while in-district enrolment fell 10.3%. 6.70 teacher FTE per hundred in-district pupils in FY2025, down from 6.87 in FY2009: teaching fell faster than the roll did. It has been last in the group in 3 of the 17 years the state has published, though not the lowest in the most recent year the state published. The two things a reader hears as contradictory are both true here — measured from FY2011 instead, the ratio has RISEN, from 6.15, because over those years the denominator fell faster. Which window a comparison is drawn over decides its sign, so the window belongs beside the figure.

what other districts spend → · what happens as students leave →

Inside special education the money went to paraprofessionals: those 5 budget lines rose 108.4% over FY2017 to FY2025, while the 5 special education teacher lines rose 20.1%. $597,464 to $1,244,894 against $1,537,583 to $1,846,499, both panels read at the restated stage over the 9 years both of them cover. These are NET general fund lines — what the town has to raise after grants, circuit breaker reimbursement and revolving funds have paid their share — so the same rise appears whether the district added paraprofessionals or a grant that had been paying for them ended and the cost landed on the town. Which of the two it is matters: this is the line this project’s own in-district special education escalator is built on.

what special education costs → · what happens when a grant stops →

The schools’ health insurance is $5,222,731 in FY2026, and $1,521,536 of it is not in the school budget at all: it is appropriated to the town’s insurance department, so the appropriation residents argue about understates what the town raises for the schools. The district’s FY2026 appropriation is $26,287,474, and account 0100-19142-570018 — school retirees’ health insurance — is not inside it. Retiree health is the town’s obligation under Chapter 32B rather than the School Committee’s, so it is appropriated to the town’s insurance department instead. Adding it raises what the town raises for the schools by 5.8% without a single service changing, and the whole of the schools’ health insurance, both departments together, is $5,222,731.

the money outside the budget → · how the money reaches the schools →

The town’s insurance department has nearly doubled since FY2011, to $3,713,520 — 4.3% a year, against a levy limit Proposition 2½ raises by 2.5% a year plus new growth. Insurance takes a growing share of every increase the town votes. $1,970,826 in FY2011 against $3,713,520 in FY2026, appropriation against appropriation in every year: 12 of the 15 annual reports print an insurance block whose component lines sum, to the cent, to the subtotal the page itself prints, and the last point comes from the town’s ledger. The school-named part of it grew faster still over the short run that can be measured at all — $1,213,618 in FY2023 to $1,521,536 in FY2026, 7.8% a year — but that is two observations from two publishers, not a trend.

the revenue side of the same squeeze → · what cannot be answered →

When the school budget stops paying for something, it usually comes back: 93 of the 132 things cut to zero between FY2015 and FY2022 were funded again in a later year. Those lines carried $734,469 the year before they went to zero, and $553,289 of it came back on the same line. So somebody quoting one year’s zero as a programme being cut is quoting the 29.5% case. What this measures is the district’s own reporting of its general fund: a line at zero can also be a rename, a merge, or work that moved to a grant, and the book cannot tell those apart.

what happens when a grant stops paying → · what this record cannot settle →

What stops for good is small: 39 things the schools paid for were cut and never funded again, $181,180 between them — 0.8% of the $23,682,594 school budget for FY2025. The dollars are not spread evenly across them. 5 of the 39 are teaching or specialist lines and they carry $125,505 — 69.3% of the money — while the rest are mostly books, materials and supplies. The largest single one is System School Psychologist, last funded at $66,550 in FY2016. That is the shape of what ends here: many small endings, and the money concentrated in a handful of specialist posts.

the people the budget buys → · what this record cannot settle →

The two biggest lasting falls in the school budget are both money paid to other schools to teach Lunenburg children: Special Ed Tuitions/Private is 50.6% below its FY2015 peak, and Collaborative Tuitions is 67.2% below its own. Special Ed Tuitions/Private peaked at $1,114,849 and averaged $550,435 across FY2024 and FY2025; Collaborative Tuitions peaked at $335,187 and averaged $109,968. Together that is $789,633 a year below the peaks, in the part of the budget this town most often hears is running away with it. These are the district’s own general fund lines and they are net: a fall can be the town’s share falling rather than the spending falling, and a placement count is a different quantity again.

the same money measured across every fund → · the placement count itself →

No measured year’s reported spending landed further than 2.6% from the budget printed beside it — and underneath that, only 198 of 576 line-years landed within 2% of their own line. The total is dependable; any single line in it is not. That is what a budget of this kind is: a plan whose parts absorb one another. Salaries came in 0.8% under across 346 line-years and everything else 0.2% over across 195, and the two very nearly cancel. Underneath them 125 of the 576 line-years missed by more than a quarter, in both directions. So a resident or a Finance Committee member can rely on the bottom line and should not read one line’s number as a forecast of that line. Both columns come out of the district’s own budget books — a budget printed beside a prior year the same publisher restated — so this is a pattern in what the district reports about itself, not a reading of the town’s books.

the funds these two columns never show → · what cannot be answered →

Only 7 of the 98 school budget lines with four or more measured years miss the same way in every one of them, and the largest averages $42,878. The misses in this budget look like noise, not like lines quietly over-provided. 6 of the 7 land under their own line and the rest over, and every one of them is small: the largest is special education transportation at $42,878 a year below plan, and the next is $20,754. A padded budget shows up as the same lines over-provided year after year, and that pattern is not in these documents. What it establishes is a pattern in the district’s own budget books restating themselves — the FY2026 ledger is the only accounting record the archive holds for school spending, and it is not one of the measured years.

the written analysis behind this page →

Out-of-district tuition is the line nobody can forecast: across 6 measured years the district’s own books report it from 27.0% over the budget to 51.5% under, while special education staffing never missed by more than 5.9%. When a child’s plan requires a school the district cannot provide, the town pays another school: it does not set the price, does not choose how many children need it, and cannot say no. The part the district does control behaves nothing like it — special education staffing lands within 5.9% in every one of those years. So a budget can be expected to be about right on the staffing and cannot be expected to be right on the placements, and a year in which tuition lands far from plan is not evidence that anybody planned badly. Both columns are the district restating its own budget book rather than a ledger.

what special education actually costs → · who ends up out of district →

The number of Lunenburg children going to school somewhere other than a Lunenburg school has barely moved in 13 years — 186 then, 177 now, a change of -4.8% — while where they go changed completely. Monty Tech went 70 to 97. School choice went 69 to 58. Charter schools went 44 to 22. Anybody watching only the total would report that nothing is happening here, and three things beneath it are moving in different directions at once, one of them by half. Over the same span the children in Lunenburg’s own schools went 1,513 to 1,553. That matters for planning because the three routes cost the town different amounts and none of them is controlled by the same decision.

what Monty Tech is assessed for → · what more leaving would cost →

The largest single destination for a Lunenburg child educated elsewhere is not school choice. It is Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical, with 97 children. More than school choice and charter schools put together. Those children are counted as resident MEMBERS, because Lunenburg belongs to that district and helps fund it — a family choosing it is not choosing OUT of anything the town runs, and no Lunenburg decision admits or refuses any of them. Reading “children who leave” as school choice alone understates the count by more than half and points the argument at the one route the town has least to do with.

the Monty Tech assessment →

A Lunenburg child enrolling at Monty Tech does not add to what the town has to raise for schools. It moves part of it: the state sets ONE required contribution for the whole town and splits it between the town’s two districts. In FY2026 that single town-wide requirement was $14,605,342, of which Monty Tech’s share was $1,270,711 and Lunenburg Public Schools’ $13,334,631. The town-wide total is the lesser of what the state calculates from Lunenburg’s property values and resident income and a cap on the local share of its foundation budget — and the wealth figure is the binding one in all 20 years DESE publishes, so enrollment never enters it. The split is each district’s share of the town’s foundation budget, and that identity holds to a tenth of a basis point in 19 of those years.

what the state requires the town to spend → · what happens when students leave →

What Lunenburg is billed for Monty Tech is not what a Monty Tech place costs. The town’s $1,334,521 is 3.9% of the district’s budget while Lunenburg’s children are 6.8% of its foundation enrollment. Monty Tech’s FY2026 budget is $34,641,344. Chapter 70 aid paid straight to the district covers 54.2% of it, and assessments on all eighteen member towns together cover 38.0%; the rest is the district’s own receipts, and none of that appears in Lunenburg’s bill. So this line measures what the town raises, and it can move in a year when nothing at the school costs any more or any less.

how state aid is set → · what nobody publishes →

This line cannot be planned as an ordinary cost escalator. Carried forward at 2.5% a year it reached $1,005,464 for FY2026, and the assessment came in at $1,334,521. Over the same span the state-required minimum inside the assessment compounded at 9.3% a year, and Monty Tech’s share of the town’s foundation budget — the fraction that decides how much of one town-wide requirement lands here — went from 7.2% to 8.7%. Neither of those is a price, and neither is inside an inflation assumption. A town that wants this line forecast has to forecast the Chapter 70 formula and the split, which is a different exercise and a harder one.

every rate this project uses, and its source → · why the formula lands where it does →

If 78 high school students transferred out under school choice — the scenario as it was put to this site — $401,700 leaves the town in the first year, and the town would have to stop spending 31.0% of what it appropriates per pupil just to break even. $390,000 of that is sending tuition and $11,700 is Chapter 70 aid at the margin the formula is currently paying. Both go in year one. The students come out of four grades, 21.3 of them from the largest, which has 118 residents in it — so the $1,296,209 of appropriation they carry with them, at $16,618 a pupil, only stops being spent where somebody decides to stop spending it. That decision is the whole of the difference between a town that loses money and a town that does not.

the children who actually leave, counted → · what comparable districts spend →

Chapter 70 is currently moving $150 for one foundation pupil, not the $14,440 the foundation budget is worth per pupil — a factor of 96.3 between the two figures a scenario could price a departing student at. DESE’s own aid-component columns make each year’s aid the previous year’s plus named increments, an identity that holds to the dollar in all 7 of the last seven years. In FY2026 the whole of Lunenburg’s $240,450 increase is the minimum aid increment and the foundation aid increment is $0; $240,450 spread over 1,603 foundation pupils is $150 each. Across the 33 years DESE publishes, foundation enrolment fell in 17 of them and aid fell in 3.

why the aid lands where it does → · the whole state aid line, not Chapter 70 alone →

Children already leave. DESE counts 58 Lunenburg residents choicing out in SY2026 against 11 arriving, so the question the scenario puts is not whether school choice happens here but how fast it moves. The outward count has run between 56 and 106 in every year since SY2014, and a further 22 residents attend charter schools. The scenario adds 78 in a single year, which would take the outward flow to 136 — 2.34 times what DESE currently counts. Nothing in the published record has moved that far that fast, and that is the honest way to read the scenario: as a rate, against a flow somebody already measures.

where they go, measured → · the largest destination outside Lunenburg — families choose it, and the bill follows a different rule →

Lunenburg has not had a year of net gain in the thirteen school years DESE publishes — 177 children left in SY2026 against 15 arriving. The net barely moves, and that is what hides it: leaving is flat and arriving has fallen 70.6%. Leaving has run between 176 and 237 and ends at 177, nine fewer than the 186 it began at. Arriving has gone from 51 to 15. The net has been a loss of between 135 and 192 children in every single year, which is why the page draws all three lines: the net on its own is nearly flat across the whole of the movement.

the outward half, decomposed → · what a family pays to stay →

Athletics in FY2026 took $665,245 out of two different pots for 649 participations — $1,025 each — and the town’s appropriation was $518,334 of it. The fee-funded revolving fund spent the other $146,911, and banked $188,944 in user fees the same year — 28.4% of what the two pots spent between them. Per participation the fund actually banked $306 at the high school against a posted fee of $325, because waivers and sibling discounts sit in the same pool. A resident reading the town’s budget line sees $518,334 and a family reading the fee schedule sees $325; neither is the whole of what a season takes.

what a family pays across the whole budget → · the funds outside the budget →

Athletics took $602,285 out of the town’s two pots in FY2024 — $250,642 more than the district’s own workbook says the whole programme cost. $317,004 of it is traced to individual payments in the fee-funded fund’s cashbook — the only transaction-level record of athletics in this archive — and $285,281 is the appropriation in the district’s budget book. Part of the difference is scope: $160,980 of the appropriation sits on lines like the athletic director and the trainer that the workbook does not carry at all. That leaves $89,662 neither document accounts for. Every per-sport figure anybody quotes comes from that one workbook, so the spread is published rather than reconciled — averaging figures different people assembled to answer different questions would be adding a claim the documents do not make.

what produced each document’s figures → · what the record cannot answer →

Lunenburg’s athletic transportation line rose from $40,000 to $87,822 in a year when the bus bill itself fell from $117,555 to $91,066: the cost went down and the town’s share went up. In FY2024 the fee-funded fund paid $77,555 of that bill, 66.0% of it; in FY2025 it paid $3,244, 3.6%. Nothing about the buses had to change for the town’s line to more than double — what changed is which pot paid. The two sides sum to the district’s own transportation total exactly in both years, which is what lets them be read as two parts of one bill, and the FY2026 line is $127,550. It is the clearest measurement on this site of why a budget line rising is not a cost rising.

the funds outside the budget → · where the money is →

Two Lunenburg high schoolers, one sport each, riding the bus and joining a club, cost their family $1,110 in FY2027: $700 in athletic fees, $270 for the bus and $140 in student activity fees. The athletic fee is charged per child per season — $400 for the first child and $300 for the second, the 25% sibling discount the School Committee voted, compounding. The bus is one charge for the whole family however many children ride. The activity fee is $70 a child and was last set in public for an earlier year. And $1,110 is a FLOOR: 9 further charges a Lunenburg family can meet — preschool, extended day, field trips, device repair among them — are sold by the district with no published amount anywhere in this archive, so no family and no committee can total a school year exactly.

both sides of the athletics money → · every rate, with the document that set it →

The same 3 children playing one sport each cost one Lunenburg family $812.50 a year and another $150 — a factor of 5.42 between two households at the same school. FY2026 is the most recent year in which both rates are published. A family that qualifies pays a flat $50 a child a season with no sibling ladder at all, and a family whose fee is waived pays $0. So the argument that “parents should pay more” is really an argument about which parents: the same children in the same uniforms are a completely different bill depending on the household they belong to, and the argument is usually made without any of these figures in it.

what the fees bring in against what the town appropriates → · the rates nobody publishes →

A second child costs a Lunenburg family $460 more and a third $295 more — not another $650 each — because the bus is one charge for the whole family and every athlete after the first pays 25% less than the one before. One high school child playing a sport, riding the bus and joining a club is $650 in FY2027. Two are $1,110 and three are $1,405. The bus is $180 for one child and $270 for any number, so the second child adds $90 there and the third adds nothing; athletics falls $400, $300, $225 down the ladder; only the activity fee, at $70 a child, is flat. Which charges are per family and which are per child is what decides what a larger household pays, and it is the part of the schedule nobody argues about.

what a fourth child pays, and the rest of the register → · every rate, with the document that set it →