What the money buys

• The district is not the city. It holds 60.0% of Aurora’s residents (231,809 of 386,261, 2020 Census, measured block by block). Of its own 234,273 residents, 1.1% live outside the city. Cherry Creek School District 5 holds most of the rest; it has its own row below. Three more districts hold 3,779 Aurora residents between them, under 1% of the city, and are not shown.
• Total Program and funding per pupil come from the last district funding worksheet the state published for each year. They are after the budget stabilization factor that held funding below the formula until FY 2024-25. They are in dollars of each year, not adjusted for inflation. FY 2025-26 is the first year on the state’s new school funding formula, so the change into that year is partly a change of rules. The line starts at FY 2014-15; the state’s older worksheets use a layout this page does not read.
• The Colorado line on the per-pupil chart is the same worksheets’ statewide column. It is statewide Total Program over the statewide funded pupil count, the district’s own arithmetic. No U.S. line is drawn there. No national series counts a state formula amount per funded pupil. The federal per-pupil series counts all spending from every source, a different measure, so the two would not share an axis honestly.
• The graduation chart’s Colorado line is the statewide rate printed in the same state release as the district’s, and its U.S. line is the federal four-year adjusted cohort rate, the same basis. The federal series is published through the class of 2022, so the U.S. line stops there.
• Total Program and enrollment carry no comparison line. Statewide, both are many times the district’s, so on one axis they would flatten its line. An index would replace the count the chart reports.
• The enrollment chart starts at 2017-18. Before that, the state workbook’s district rows do not add up to its own state total, so those years cannot be checked.

This reading rests on: Total Program funding · Pupils taught · Funding per pupil · Graduating in 4 years

• Aurora runs no jail. Detention is run by the county sheriffs, three counties’ worth, out of their own budgets. So a Corrections budget and a People incarcerated /100k figure do not exist for the city, and jail is not prison either. The police budget is not renamed to fill that slot. The counties’ money is on the dashboard under each county’s own name, and city and county figures are never summed.
• No Vehicle theft rank is shown. The rank orders the 51 state-level jurisdictions, and a city is not one of them, so none is produced.
• The police line is the General Fund appropriation, as each year’s own adopted budget book prints it in Attachment 5. It is never an actual or a projection. The department also draws on other funds, such as grants, which this line does not include, so it is not the department’s whole cost. The city lists adopted books back to 2020. Each is checked against the next book, which prints the same figure again as that year’s original budget.
• The Colorado and U.S. lines are the FBI’s own state and national rates, the lines the Colorado page draws: offenses reported by the agencies in the state or the nation, divided by the FBI’s population figure for it. Aurora’s rate divides by the population its own police department serves instead, the FBI’s per-agency figure. Both are per resident, so read the distance between the lines, not the last decimal. Agencies covering 98.0% to 99.5% of Colorado’s population reported in every year shown, and 94.8% to 97.7% of the nation’s in the other years. The exception is 2021: national coverage fell to 77.0% that year, below the 90% the site requires, so the U.S. line breaks there.
• The Aurora Police Department is an original NIBRS agency, reporting incident-based data since 1985. So its own counts carry no break at the 2021 national change in how crime is counted. The 2021 gap in the U.S. line is the nation’s, not the city’s.
• The police budget has no comparison line. No state or national figure measures what it measures, one city’s adopted police budget. The site never adds or averages one government’s money with another’s.

This reading rests on: Police budget · Aggravated assaults /100k · Vehicle thefts /100k · Burglaries /100k