Why we only get minimum aid

Aid moves at the Legislature’s flat rate while the floor binds. FY26: $240,450 across 1,603 pupils is $150.00, to the cent.

The town’s target contribution is its combined effort yield, in all 20 years. Enrolment does not appear in it.

The statutory cap that WOULD bring enrolment in — the target local share may not exceed 82.5% of the foundation budget — is not binding here. Lunenburg’s target share is 68.7% in FY26.

The town’s single requirement is split between its districts in proportion to their foundation budgets, to under two dollars in 19 of 20 years. In FY26, $14,605,342 times $22,073,946 over $24,177,462 gives $13,334,631 against a printed $13,334,631. The remaining $1,270,711 is the town’s contribution toward its other district. The exception is FY07, where the printed figure is $18,090 off the proportion — the first year of the series, and nothing here says why.

That one more child brings the town $150. It does not follow from the arithmetic on this page. While the floor binds, aid moves at the Legislature’s per-pupil rate — but a large enough foundation budget increase closes the $249,645 of headroom and moves the district off the floor entirely, and no document in this archive models that.

What the marginal pupil costs. The foundation budget is built from rates that differ by grade and by category, and the workbook publishes Lunenburg’s categories without the rates. The average of $13,770 a pupil is not the cost of the next one.

That the Legislature sets the same floor next year. It has been $30, $60, $104 and $150 a pupil in the four years it bound here, and it was not available at all before FY2022.

Why aid moved by more than DESE’s own components in FY2010, FY2011, FY2012, FY2019. The workbook prints the increments and prints no residual.

That a rising required contribution share means the town is being asked for more than it can pay, or less. The share is a ratio of two published figures. What a town can afford is not in this workbook.

money in

What Chapter 70 aid would actually do if enrolment fell

MUCH NARROWER THAN IT WAS. DESE’s Chapter 70 trends workbook breaks the aid calculation into its named components, and for Lunenburg they show that this year’s aid is last year’s aid plus named increments — an identity that holds to the dollar in every one of the last seven years. In FY2026 the whole of the increase is the minimum aid increment, $240,450, which is exactly $150.00 for each of the 1,603 foundation pupils, and the foundation aid increment is zero. Over thirty-four years foundation enrolment fell in 17 and aid fell in 3 — FY1997, FY2010 and FY2011. DESE’s component columns show a reduction applied in FY2010 and FY2011; they start at FY2007, so nothing in this archive says why aid fell in FY1997. So the marginal aid attached to one foundation pupil is currently about $150 and not the $14,440 foundation budget per pupil. What is NOT established: that the Legislature sets the same minimum aid rate next year — it has ranged from $30 to $150 a pupil in the years published — nor what happens if a large enough enrolment fall moves the district off the minimum aid track, which no document here models.

Closes: DESE’s preliminary Chapter 70 aid calculation for Lunenburg for the year in question, which states the foundation aid, minimum aid and hold-harmless components before the year is set.

money in

What the foundation budget pays per pupil for each kind of child

DESE builds the foundation budget from per-pupil rates that differ by grade and by category, and it publishes the CATEGORIES for Lunenburg — FY2026 foundation enrolment of 1,603, of whom 54 are English learners (3.4%), 452 are low income (28.8%, low-income group 5) and none is vocational, at a wage adjustment factor of 1.000 — without publishing the rate attached to any of them in the same file. So which children leave a district changes the foundation effect and not only how many, and this archive can state that it matters and cannot size it.

Closes: DESE’s FY26 foundation budget rate schedule, the table of per-pupil rates by grade and category and the low-income increment by decile group.

people

How many children Chapter 70 is actually paid for

The aid is calculated on a `Foundation enrollment` of 1,599 in DESE’s FY27 Chapter 70 summary. DESE publishes three other counts for the same district — Student Headcount, In-District FTE Pupils and Total FTE Pupils — and in the latest year published they are 1,563, 1,568.9 and 1,665.9. Four numbers, one agency, none of them equal, measured on different dates and counting different things. So every per-pupil figure on this project, including aid per pupil, is a division by a count whose definition has to be stated with it, and no published document reconciles the foundation count to the children in the buildings.

Closes: DESE’s FY27 foundation enrollment worksheet for Lunenburg, which states the October 1 count by grade and category the formula was run on.

money in

Why Chapter 70 aid moved by more than the components DESE publishes, in FY2010, FY2011, FY2012 and FY2019

DESE’s Chapter 70 trends workbook prints the aid build-up as named increments — foundation aid, down payment aid, growth aid, target aid phase-in, minimum aid — and in fifteen of the nineteen differenced years they sum to the change in aid to the dollar. In four they do not. FY2010 and FY2011 carry a separate `c70aidreduct` column of −$92,416 and −$279,101, and only the first of the two accounts for its year; FY2012 moved +$24,149 with every increment printed as zero; FY2019 moved $13,365 more than its single increment. The workbook prints no residual line, so the difference has no name in the source. It matters because this page reads the components to say what the formula did, and in those four years the components do not add up to what it did.

Closes: DESE’s Chapter 70 aid calculation worksheet for FY2010, FY2011, FY2012 and FY2019, which states every adjustment applied to a district between the prior year’s aid and the current year’s.

held

Which cell of DESE’s contribution sheet is mislabelled in FY2020

In eighteen of the nineteen differenced years the town’s preliminary contribution equals the previous year’s required contribution multiplied by that year’s municipal revenue growth factor, exactly as DESE’s own User Guide defines it, and the required contribution is that figure adjusted toward target. In FY2020 the two are the other way round: `dataContribution!O2593` prints $10,427,328, which is FY2019’s required contribution un-grown, and `dataContribution!U2593` prints $10,889,259, which is that figure grown by the 4.43% factor. One of the two cells is carrying the other’s quantity and nothing in the workbook says which. The extract records what the sheet holds rather than repairing it.

Closes: DESE’s FY2020 required local contribution worksheet for Lunenburg, which prints the preliminary contribution and the required contribution as separate stated steps.