In FY2025 grants fell in 16 parts of the school budget. The town’s money rose in 8 of them.

What this establishes

The number this page nearly published

The first version of this analysis had one headline: grants fell $2,023,188, the general fund rose $1,999,627, and the district spent $23,561 less in all. Those three figures are correct. The sentence anybody would build from them is not.

So the aggregate is several things at once. 8 functions did hand over from one fund to the other. Across the 27 functions where grants did not fall, the general fund moved $1,470,167 — a movement with no grant fall anywhere behind it, and it is bigger than the swap. The total lands near zero because large changes in both directions cancel, not because one replaced the other. The near-identity is a coincidence of magnitudes, and it is the only thing on this page that would have been quoted at a meeting.

Both funds, every year the state has collected them

The two parts of one total — the state’s own total column, which the extract reconciles to before any of this is published. The general fund is what the town appropriates and argues about at Town Meeting. Everything above it is money the district spends that never appears in that argument.

The same thing as a share, plotted from zero

The general fund share never drops below 81.5% across the whole record, so drawing it needs an axis that does not start at zero — and a truncated axis on a share turns a real move into a cliff. Its complement carries the same information and starts at zero.

Where grants fell, and what happened next

Every function present in two consecutive years, sorted on the signs of two numbers. The top panel is the functions where grants fell and the general fund rose. The bottom is the functions where grants fell and the general fund did not. They share a scale so they can be compared — and they are drawn apart so they cannot be added, because adding them is the aggregate this page refuses to report.

The largest single swaps in the whole record

One function, one year, ranked on how far the grant money fell. The list is here because the year-by-year totals above are sums over many functions, and a reader should be able to see which individual movements are doing the work.

FY2025, function by function

Grants fell and the general fund rose

8 functions. Grants -$1,127,647, general fund $1,136,013. The signs are kept from here down: these are tables of movements rather than sentences about them.

Grants fell and the general fund did not rise

8 functions. Grants -$1,542,511, general fund -$606,553.

And the largest general fund increases, whatever the grants did

The two lists above are selected on a grant falling, which is exactly the selection that makes a year look like a handover. These are the biggest general fund movements in FY2025 without that filter.

The one line this project has flagged as load-bearing

The in-district special education escalator in this project’s model rests on a paraprofessional line, and the standing note beside it says the line cannot be distinguished from grant money unwinding. In FY2025 function 2330, Paraprofessionals, moved -$254,461 in grants and $181,363 in the general fund — -$73,098 across both. This is as close as the published record gets, and it is not close enough: it shows the funding mix for a function moving. It does not show a post moving, or a person, or the same work being paid for from a different pocket.

What was said at the time

This project’s method requires it: for anything a report says rose or fell, search the meeting archive for what people said about that thing in the same year. This is the one page where the answer is abundant. The end of the federal money was discussed at length, by name, with figures attached, and well before it happened.

The terms run against the archive, with what each returned: ESSER in 125, ARPA in 360, circuit breaker in 27, grant funded in 10, one-time funds in 2, federal grant in 76, Title I in 38, revolving in 145. Searched across 12,014 extracted documents, out of 12,015 the archive holds. Only 8,899 of those — 74% — carry readable text at all; the other 3,116 are mostly image scans (3,096 of them) awaiting OCR. An empty result above is a statement about the readable archive and never about the town.

What would have shown this coming

The district said it, in public, with a figure, before the budget was voted. The loss was named to the School Committee on 2023-11-15 and again on 2024-01-17, alongside the insurance increase that was not anticipated. Whatever else is arguable here, naming a known cliff far enough ahead to plan around it is the thing a board most needs and does not always get, and the record shows it happening.

And the fund split is published every year. The state has collected it since FY2009; it arrives after the year closes, so it is a check on what happened rather than a warning about what is coming. What neither source carries is which grant — and that is the number that would have let anybody test the claim being made at the time.

One thing to ask for next year

The district’s end-of-year grant expenditure detail by grant code — or Schedule 19 of the End of Year Financial Report as filed, which lists each grant separately — alongside the budget rather than after it. That single document turns “grants and revolving funds fell $2,023,188” into a statement about named programmes with end dates, which is what a board is being asked to plan against. It is a report the accounting the district already files can produce.

“Were the cuts really only the grant money?”

It is the question this page will be read for, and the honest answer is that nothing here tests it. The claim is about posts and contracts; this source reports dollars against function codes, split two ways, with every grant and every revolving fund in one column. Those are different quantities on different calendars, and putting them beside each other would not reconcile them. What the state’s figures do show is that in FY2025 the money left 16 functions and the general fund rose in 8 of them — which bounds the question and does not settle it.

How this was measured

One table. dese_function_expenditure, LEA 01620000. The FY2009–FY2025 frame comes from the rows the state marks as the district total; every function-level figure comes from the detail rows, joined to themselves one year apart on the function code and on whether the spending is in or out of district. 43 functions matched across FY2024–FY2025.

Each matched function falls into exactly one of four classes, on the signs of two differences. These labels are ours. The state publishes the two columns and no classification of them.

The last row is in the table because the four classes have to be seen to account for every function — three of them adding to something short of the total, with no way to tell which functions were missing, is worse than printing the aggregate with a label on it. It is not a finding and the page does not use it as one.

A figure we computed that is not a measurement

What the general fund would have carried in 2025 if the split had stayed at its 2009 share. If grants and revolving funds had gone on paying 18.5% of everything, the general fund would have carried $24,466,117 in FY2025 rather than $26,986,344 — a difference of $2,520,227.

What this cannot say

Closes: Nothing published maps a grant to the posts it paid for. DESE’s End of Year Financial Report is the furthest the public record goes: it separates the funds and stops there. The district’s own grant award letters and its end-of-grant reports would name the positions. These limits are rows in the register at what we cannot answer, which is what the records request reads — not prose written only here.

The document behind this

Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. A statutory return. DESE sets the schema, not the district. Our copy is district-expenditures-by-function.xlsx (26.2 MB), fetched from https://educationtocareer.data.mass.gov/resource/cnfs-edqq.csv. Its sha256 is 9e43789807b17ea6a1098273da8fb7fd8a28c20d4cd4733ba9e25fc69d4d4423.

The payload this page draws is published whole at /data/grant-unwinding.json, and the rows behind it can be queried directly — see the database. The same DESE split, for the categories where the district’s own book took lines to zero, is on what stopped being funded.