What other districts spend

of its foundation budget is what the state requires Lunenburg to contribute. The median district is at 74.1%. Rank 248 of 374 — 247 districts are required to fund a larger share.

of the minimum is what the town and state together actually put in. The median district is at 1.3119×. Rank 217 of 340 — 216 districts spend a larger multiple. Stage: budgeted.

A per-pupil comparison is always at least a year behind the budget being voted

What would you have had to see, and when? These figures are DESE’s end-of-year collection, reported after a fiscal year closes. The latest here is FY25, and the Chapter 70 figures below are for FY26. A board voting a budget today is looking at a comparison of years that have already closed, and every district in it has since moved. The comparison is a description of where a town has been, not an input to a budget, and quoting it as though it described the year being voted is the single easiest mistake to make with it.

Enrolment moves this number as hard as money does, and it moves on its own

22.2% of the rise in Lunenburg’s own per-pupil figure since FY09 is the denominator. A district that loses pupils without cutting proportionally will climb this table without deciding anything, and a district that holds its enrolment will fall down it while spending more every year. Neither movement is a budget decision, and a plan built on the ratio rather than on the two halves is planning against an artefact.

The lines furthest below the state are the ones grants are already covering

Professional development and instructional materials are the two categories furthest below the statewide median, and they are also what the Superintendent’s own reports describe grant and earmark money buying — quoted below, in the district’s words. 10.1% of everything counted on this page is grant and revolving money. Which means a plan that treats the general-fund line as the whole of either category is planning against a fraction, in both directions: the service is larger than the line, and it is also less secure than the line, because a grant ends and an appropriation is voted again.

Where the district is visibly doing the sensible thing, it is not in this data

A district spending $48 a pupil on professional development that is sharing it with a neighbouring district is a different fact from one that is not, and DESE’s figure cannot tell the two apart. The Superintendent reported exactly that arrangement with North Middlesex on 2024-10-16. It is in the minutes and it is nowhere in the numbers, which is worth knowing before anybody quotes $48 at a meeting.

Why these six districts and not six others

Every comparison on this page runs against a set of six districts chosen by this project — Ashburnham-Westminster, Ayer Shirley, Groton-Dunstable, Harvard, North Middlesex and Lunenburg. DESE’s RADAR workbook covers all 421 Massachusetts districts and this archive extracts six because the full file takes the published database past Cloudflare’s per-asset limit. No document here records the criterion by which those six were picked, and a peer set is an argument: whoever chooses it has already made a claim about what Lunenburg is comparable to. That is why every headline figure on /what-other-districts-spend is stated against DESE’s statewide distribution of 318 districts rather than against the six.

closesDESE’s own DART comparison group for Lunenburg, which names the districts the Department considers similar and states the criteria it used.

What DESE’s per-pupil figure buys

DESE publishes dollars over a pupil count, by function, for every district. It does not publish what those dollars bought: a Teachers line is not a class size, an Instructional Materials line is not a textbook count, and a Paraprofessional FTE is not a person or a caseload. So Lunenburg spending $226 a pupil on instructional materials, equipment and technology against a statewide median of $626 is a measured difference in money and not a measured difference in what children have. Rule 7’s standing form: dollars are not services.

closesthe district’s own inventory and purchasing records for the materials and technology line, which would say what was bought and when.

Whether Lunenburg’s MCAS results are high or low for Massachusetts

Residents have argued the comparison in both directions at School Committee — that the town is “in the top 20% for school performance while being in the bottom 10% for spending”, and that “neighboring districts… have faced similar challenges while achieving stronger outcomes”. The spending half of that can be checked here, because DESE publishes the statewide distribution of per-pupil spending with quartiles and a rank. The results half cannot: this archive holds MCAS for six districts and no statewide distribution of it at all, so no percentile, rank or state median can be computed for any of the four measures.

closesDESE’s district-level MCAS achievement file for all districts, published per year at profiles.doe.mass.edu, extracted the way the finance distribution already is.

Whether spending less per pupil is a choice or a constraint

Lunenburg’s total per-pupil spending has been below the statewide first quartile in every one of the seventeen years DESE publishes, and its net school spending is a smaller multiple of the required minimum than the median district’s. Nothing in any of these documents distinguishes a town that decided to spend less from a town that could not raise more: the levy limit, two failed overrides, the district’s proposed budget and Town Meeting’s vote all resolve into the same single number, and the number is the outcome of all of them at once. This matters because the two readings imply opposite remedies.

closesnothing published settles it; the nearest evidence is the district’s own level-service request against the appropriation voted, year by year, which the archive holds for FY2024 onward only.

district-expenditures-by-function.xlsx

Every district’s spending by function, all funds, with DESE’s own per-pupil figure. The source of every dollar and every per-pupil figure on this page.

Stage: reported after the year closed — end-of-year finance collection. Not a budget.

Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education · 26.2 MB · the publisher’s copy
sha256 9e43789807b17ea6a1098273da8fb7fd8a28c20d4cd4733ba9e25fc69d4d4423

radar-district-comparison.xlsx

DESE’s RADAR district comparison — enrolment, demographics, staffing FTE, average teacher salary and MCAS, for all 421 Massachusetts districts. The source of the denominators, the staffing and the results on this page.

Stage: reported for the fiscal year. Not a budget.

Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education · 1.4 MB · the publisher’s copy
sha256 0391c2d358c408c5c61e0dac257cabfca5ad67bfc2187196f80d5e0492a84e79

dese-ch70-district-profile.xlsx

DESE’s Chapter 70 district profile — required local contribution, required net school spending, and what each district actually spends against it.

Stage: the Chapter 70 calculation for the fiscal year. The net school spending column carries its own stage per year and this page splits on it.

Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education · 3.8 MB · the publisher’s copy
sha256 a0dc63bc9d515b28614c0ac5a0de70402a3e8a22dab1a4333e516808ad62df61