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
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.

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