What out-of-district special education costs, and what comes back

What this establishes

What was spent, and out of which pocket

DESE’s End of Year Financial Report attributes every dollar of district spending either to the general fund or to grants and revolving funds. The lower segment of each bar is, in almost every year, exactly the figure printed in the district’s own budget book. The whole bar is what was spent.

17 years · FY2009–FY2025 · functions 9300 and 9400, tuition to non-public schools and to collaboratives

The check that establishes what the budget line is

Rule 13 says quote the source rather than your rendering of it, and rule 11 says a budget line is net without saying so. Both are settled here by comparison rather than by assertion: the district’s restated budget total for these two lines is set beside DESE’s two columns for the same two functions in the same year. It ties to one of them and not the other, in 11 of 12 years.

The exception is FY21. An identity that holds in 11 years and not in 1 is still an identity with something unexplained in it, and the year is named here rather than dropped.

The circuit breaker

The state reimburses part of what a district spends on a high-cost special education placement — above a threshold set per student, not from the first dollar. The file below is DESE’s own payment schedule: what the district claimed, what the threshold took off, and what was actually paid.

21 years · FY2006–FY2026 · DESE’s circuit breaker reimbursement schedule

The last column is that identity, checked: it is zero in 13 of the 21 years and not in 8 — FY06, FY07, FY08, FY09, FY10, FY11, FY22, FY26. The threshold divided by the number of students claimed rises smoothly year on year, which is what a per-student threshold indexed to a state rate would do; that reading is not stated in the file and is not asserted here.

Transport reimbursement appears in this file only from FY22 onward — 5 of the 21 years — and the highest payment in the whole record is $784,099 in FY16.

The two series, side by side and not netted

The money spent on these placements from outside the appropriation, and the circuit breaker payment received, for every year both are published. They are the same order of magnitude. They are not the same series, and this page does not treat one as an explanation of the other.

What the town said about this

Searched 8,899 of the 12,015 meeting documents this archive holds (74%), covering 2009-01-05 to 2026-11-17. The other 3,116 carry no text a search can match — 3,096 of them are image scans awaiting OCR. An empty result above is a statement about what can be read, never about what was said.

The documents

What this report cannot answer

• What special education costs in district. DESE’s function codes carry no special education category at all: 9300 and 9400 are the only two on the whole return that name it, and both are tuition paid to somebody else. Every in-district figure this project holds rests on a classification somebody made, and that one is ours — see /bend-the-curve.
• That the money outside the appropriation IS the circuit breaker. Both series are published above and the difference between them is stated. The grants and revolving column holds every non-general fund together, and the circuit breaker account carries a balance forward, so the two would not equal each other even if one paid the whole of the other.
• What any single placement costs. No document in this archive prices one, and nothing here divides a tuition total by a placement count — the two come from different returns with different inclusion rules.
• That a falling tuition line is a cheaper year. Rule 11: the line is net, and a year when more of it was paid from the reimbursement account looks identical on the expense side to a year when fewer children were placed.

The other three reports