What the money buys

• The district is not the city. District 11 serves 48.9% of the city’s residents and also serves some people outside it. The other 51.1% of the city’s residents live in eight other districts. The city’s own budget book says there are “nine public school districts serving greater Colorado Springs”. That is a claim about the whole metro area. Measured block by block, the city itself also lies in nine. No district’s boundary matches the city’s, so no one district’s figure stands in for “the city’s schools”.
• 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.
• The table lists the districts serving at least 10% of the city. The districts serving less are Cheyenne Mountain School District 12 (4.7%), Widefield School District 3 (0.2%) and Manitou Springs School District 14 (0.1%). The other 2 are Ellicott School District 22 (0.0%) and Fountain School District 8 (0.0%). They appear nowhere else on this page.

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

• Corrections budget is not shown: the city runs no jail. The El Paso County Sheriff’s Office runs it, out of the county’s own budget. That budget is published under the county’s name in its own section and is never added to a city figure. The police budget is not renamed to fill the slot.
• People incarcerated /100k is not shown: nobody is held in city custody, so it has no numerator. A county jail count would be a third, different measure.
• Vehicle theft rank cannot exist at the city level. The rank orders the 51 state-level jurisdictions, and a city is not one of them, so no rank exists to show.
• The police line is the General Fund budget each year, as each year’s own adopted budget book prints it in its by-department table. It is never an actual or an amended figure. The Public Safety Sales Tax fund, $52,262,048 in 2026, pays for police and fire from a separate fund. The city prints no sum of the two, and none is published here. The line starts at 2021, the oldest of the six books read.
• 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. The city’s rate divides by the population the department serves instead, the figure the FBI publishes beside the department’s counts. Both are per resident, so read the distance between the lines, not the last decimal. Agencies covering 98.8% to 99.5% of Colorado’s population reported in every year shown. For the nation the range is 94.8% to 97.7% in every other year. In 2021, national coverage fell to 77.0%. That is below the 90% the site requires, so the U.S. line breaks there.
• 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