Releases

Data are distributed as permanent, dated releases for transparency and replicability. Each release is a frozen snapshot of the compiled database stored as parquet files plus a manifest recording MD5 checksums, row counts, and build provenance. A release is never changed after it is cut. Citing release versions helps other researchers to replicate any analyses.

Available releases

Release Tables Total rows Code version
20260901 22 6,357,129 53ced30e75f4
20260808 11 5,753,745 5d26c24772ac

To obtain any release (current or historical), see Request Data.

Files are parquet — see working with the files for why, and how to read them in R, Python, or Stata.

Release notes

Each release ships with a CHANGELOG.md documenting what changed; the notes are reproduced here.

Second public release.

New since release 20260808:

  • Five more DESE reports, most covering the 2000-01 school year onward (one year earlier than the ASBR tables):
    • Indirect cost – the rate worksheet and resulting unrestricted and restricted rates, one row per LEA and year.
    • Local effort – resident ADA, total local taxes, and taxes per ADA, plus a line-level table of the tax sources behind the total.
    • Transportation aid – pupils transported, days, and route miles by eligibility category.
    • Bus depreciation – the per-bus schedule and its district-year summary.
    • Facility depreciation – the per-item schedule and its district-year summary (filed by a subset of LEAs).
  • Three more ASBR tables, parsed from the end of the same reports the first eight tables come from:
    • Grant/program expenditures (grant_expenditures) – spending on individual state and federal programs (Special Education, Title I, IDEA, school nutrition, ESSER, and others) by fund. DESE populates this section from the 2018-19 school year onward.
    • Building project memo lines (building_project_expenditures) – expenditures on building projects funded by bond proceeds (8010) and impact aid (8011), plus free/reduced-lunch and at-risk expenditures (8015), which DESE printed only through the 2014-15 school year.
    • Statement of Indebtedness (debt) – the report’s nine debt tables unified into one, from the 2001-02 school year onward: per-class totals for every LEA and year, and the individual bond issues, leases, and notes where the LEA itemized them, with each class’s descriptors (type, series, vendor, term, dates, original principal) and the five standard flows (8001-8005).
  • Report versions are now substantially filled in. Release 20260808 shipped with report_version mostly NA; a full re-capture sweep (2026-08-05 to 2026-08-18) re-captured every district-year, so this release reflects DESE’s current filings and nearly every row carries the version it was captured under. ASBR filings DESE revised since the last release (about 3,200 district-years) are updated here; the addendum in docs/releases/ADDENDUM_20260808.md maps what changed relative to the prior release.

Caveats specific to the new tables:

  • debt mixes summary and instrument rows on purpose. Filter on level before summing: class_total rows alone form a complete LEA-year panel; issue rows exist only where an LEA itemized (where they exist, they sum exactly to the class total). Summing without a level filter double-counts.
  • An LEA-year absent from grant_expenditures filed the section empty – it means “nothing reported,” not missing data.
  • TAN (tax anticipation note) rows never carry a “fund borrowed for” value: DESE’s export omits that display column’s data in every year.

The conventions and caveats in the 20260808 changelog still apply: school_year is the spring year, lea_id is the zero-padded 6-digit county-district code, blank cells are NA while 0 is a genuine zero, the newest (partial) school year is withheld – this release again ends at 2024-25 – and the two known capture exclusions (LEA 096120; district-year 115907 in 2009) stand.

First public release.

What it contains:

  • Eight district-level tables from the Annual Secretary of the Board Report (ASBR), covering the 2001-02 school year onward: revenues by source and fund, expenditures by function, object, and project, fund balances, restricted fund balances, and interfund transfers.
  • Three building-level tables from the Per Pupil Building Level Expenditures report, covering the 2018-19 school year onward (data not available prior): per-pupil expenditures by building, the full 26-line worksheet behind those figures, and a district-level summary.

Conventions and caveats worth reading before you analyze:

  • school_year is the spring year of the school year: 2027 means the 2026-27 school year (FY27).
  • lea_id is the 6-digit, zero-padded county-district code. Building tables additionally key on building_code, which is unique within an LEA but not statewide – join on both.
  • A blank cell in the source report is NA, never 0. A 0 means the report genuinely stated $0.
  • Every table carries report_version, DESE’s version indicator for the filing a row came from, as displayed when it was captured. Version tracking began 2026-08-05, so this is NA for most rows in this release and will fill in as filings are re-captured.
  • Complete school years only. Districts file over a period of months, so the newest year sits at a fraction of its eventual coverage for a long time. Rather than include these partially populated data, we hold it back until coverage is higher; it will appear in a later release. This release therefore ends at the 2024-25 school year (school_year 2025), even though some 2025-26 ASBR filings already exist.
  • A few buildings report almost no students. Hospital, juvenile detention, and some early-childhood and special-education co-op sites record expenditures against an ADA or September membership at or near zero, which makes their per-pupil figures enormous, or zero where DESE suppressed the calculation. These are passed through exactly as DESE published them.
  • One LEA (096120, St. Louis Career Education) cannot be captured because of an error on DESE’s portal, and one district-year (115907 in 2009) is excluded because its source file is malformed.

Values may change if districts update their ASBRs, and future releases will track these changes