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Schools budget history

Two numbers get called "the schools budget." Audited actuals from the town's ACFRs go back to fiscal year 2001. The superintendent's proposed budget, by category, goes back to fiscal year 2018, from School Committee meeting packets. Both are below.

What actually got spent, fiscal year 2001 to fiscal year 2024

Source: fiscal year 2024 ACFR, page 129, Schedule of Expenditures by Function. 1 The highlighted fiscal year 2022 and fiscal year 2023 points are reporting anomalies, not operating spending. Fiscal year 2022 reflects a likely Governmental Accounting Standards Board pension or OPEB liability adjustment; fiscal year 2023 includes prior-year adjustments per the auditor's note. Neither is a trend point.

Superintendent's proposed budget by category, fiscal year 2026 and fiscal year 2027

Category FY26 FY27 Change
Level-funded, pre-reduction. February 5, 2026 School Committee packet.2 Fixed Charges (health insurance, retirement) are budgeted town-side and excluded.

How Marblehead compares to peers, fiscal year 2024

Fiscal year 2024 education spending across 17 Massachusetts municipalities, sorted by per capita. Marblehead is highlighted. 3

Town Education (fiscal year 2024) Population Per capita Per student
Sources and notes

Panel 1 comes from education_expenditure_FY01-24.csv (each year's Education line from that fiscal year's ACFR). FY22 and FY23 are one-time reporting anomalies (GASB liability adjustment and prior-year adjustments); excluding them the underlying trend 2015 to 2024 is broadly linear.

Panel 2 comes from mps_proposed_budget_by_category.csv, extracted by extract_mps_proposed_budget.mjs from the February 5, 2026 packet. Bucket sums total $48.6M in FY26 and $50.0M in FY27; the packet's headline of $49.1M for both years reflects town-side Fixed Charges (about $883K, not shown here) plus roughly $1.6M in entity-level reductions taken to hit the level-funded target. FY18 through FY25 land in follow-up updates.

Peer block totals from peer_schedule_a_expenditures.csv (DOR Schedule A). Population from dor_income_eqv_pop_FY27.csv. Enrollment from dese_peer_enrollment_FY24.csv (DESE E2C Hub). Sorted by per-capita because sorting by raw dollars just ranks by town size.