How it works

What this site holds, how it does the math, and what it refuses to do. We put this right up front, same as any result, because a number you can't check the method for is not a number you can trust.

The master list

Everything starts from one master list of who exists. We pull it fresh each night from the Agency of Education's public data feed and save a full copy every time. Right now it holds52 supervisory unions, 61 unified districts, 294schools, 267 towns, 120 independent schools,20 career and technical centers, and 4 academies.

Each one gets a steady ID of our own, tied to the AOE's ID. AOE's IDs and names will change a lot as the 2029 reorganization moves ahead, and a link used in a committee packet still has to work later. We never delete anything — it closes, with a date — so you can still compare things before and after a reorganization.

Two limits, said plainly. The data feed gives no opening dates, so a "first recorded" date is just the day our sync first saw it, and we label it that way — not as a founding date. And the feed shows no "this district replaced that one" links at all, so any claim that one district followed another is typed in by hand from the law and carries a note saying so.

How we store a budget

One record per district per year, kept simple on purpose: about a dozen broad categories that line up with the state's account list, not four hundred tiny line items. We can add more detail later; we can't easily take it back out once a hundred documents have been entered at the wrong level.

Each record shows the same dollars two ways. One way splits spending by job — teaching, special education, district office, school office, running the buildings, busing, and paying off debt. The other splits it by type — pay, health insurance, other benefits, and how many full-time staff. Both describe one total, so you never add them together. Our checks reject any record where staff costs are more than total spending, because that can only mean one of the two was read wrong.

We pull out health insurance on its own, because it is what most school board arguments are really about, and because it keeps growing even when staff numbers do not.

When a district prints a number that does not match the one we work out — spending per student, most of all — we keep both and note that they disagree. We do not quietly smooth it over. The gap is often the interesting part.

What a blank means

Every blank money box has to be explained: either marked "not in the source document," with the name of the person who confirmed that and the date, or flagged as a line that did not fit cleanly. If it isn't explained, the checks fail. That is what makes a blank mean "the district did not publish this" instead of "nobody looked." Without the rule, those two look the same, and the data can't be trusted.

The math engine

The math engine is a small, self-contained piece of code. It runs both when we build the site and in your browser when you try a what-if. What it hands back is not just a number but a tree of steps. Each step carries its inputs, what it did, the result, a plain-language note, and the source for every legal number it used. The walk-through you see in the what-if tool is that tree shown directly — the words and the math are made together and can't drift apart.

Two things are built into how it works, not just good habits. A legal number that hasn't been checked can't produce a result: the step returns nothing, gets marked unchecked, and that mark spreads up to every step that depends on it — so an unchecked weight can't quietly become a published number four steps later. And "we haven't checked this against the law" is a different mark from "the district didn't publish this." The engine keeps the two apart all the way to the screen.

The four kinds of blank

A blank on this site always means one specific thing, and the site tells you which. There are four. Each belongs to a different group, and each needs a different fix. Showing any two of them the same way would pin a gap on whoever is easiest to blame.

unverified

A legal number has not been checked against the current law. Our work still to do. The fix is that someone reads the law.

missing input

The source document does not include the number. A fact about the document. No one here fixes it by working harder; we just record it, with who confirmed it was missing and when.

undetermined

The State has not made a decision that does not exist yet. Nobody's fault, for now. The Agency of Education has made no small-or-sparse-by-necessity decisions because the rules for them are not written yet — showing that as a missing document would suggest the Agency failed to publish something, which is not true.

not computable

The question can't be answered from public data at all: it needs an official sign-off, a local study, or a population forecast. This will never change. It is a correct final answer, not a task, and a coverage chart that marked it red would be getting "done" wrong.

Apart from all four, a number can be contingent — it rests on a law that has not passed yet. That is a warning label on a number, not a missing number, and a number can be both contingent and blank.

The small and sparse schools pagecovers the part that needed the last two.

Numbers from the law, and their sources

Weights, yields, and cutoffs are data, not code. When the Legislature changes one — which it has in most recent sessions — we edit a file like the one below, and every calculation, source, and note updates with it.

FY2025 draft

FY2026 draft

FY2027 draft

FY2030 draft

The new base-amount formula

Act 73 of 2025 points Vermont toward a new way of funding schools: a set base amount per student and one statewide tax rate, set to start with the 2028–29 reorganization if it takes effect. The Legislature has not set the numbers yet. So those numbers are marked contingent and hold no value at all — not a placeholder, not a guess. When there is a solid basis for a range, like published consultant advice, they will show a range with that basis attached instead of a single number, and everything figured from them will be labeled contingent all the way through.

One point matters more than any number here: with one statewide rate, a district's own budget no longer sets its own tax rate. That is a different cause-and-effect than today's system, not just different math, and the tool says so wherever it applies.

Proof the math is right

Before we publish any figured number, the engine has to match the state's own published student counts and announced tax rates for a sample of districts, down to rounding. Those test cases live in the code and run automatically on every change. Matching the state's own published numbers, with the tests out in the open, is the strongest proof we can give that this site's math is right — and we claim none of it until those tests exist and pass.

What the tool will not do

It does not score, rank, or recommend what-ifs, and there is no "savings" spin anywhere in it — not on screen and not in the code, where the field is named so no one can quietly assume which way the answer was hoped to go. Changes are shown both ways, with the guesses behind them visible and yours to change, and the list of guesses sits beside every result.

Corrections

We fix mistakes in the open. Every change to data, formulas, or sources is saved as a commit, and the list of changes shows them. When this site is wrong, the record of it being wrong and then fixed stays visible.