What the money buys

• Total Program and funding per pupil come from the last district funding worksheet the state education department published for each year. They are the figures after the budget stabilization factor, which held funding below the formula until FY 2024-25. The state publishes one for every year from FY 2014-15, every district a column, and this page reads Denver’s column in all twelve. 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 lines run straight through and the year is marked in the tables.
• The funding per pupil figure includes the local property-tax share: property tax alone is 70.7% of Total Program in FY 2025-26. The worksheets split Total Program three ways, into the state’s share, property tax and specific ownership tax (a vehicle tax shared with the district). The second table below prints all three for every year. They are not added into a single local share, because the worksheets print no such total before FY 2025-26.
• The funded pupil count, 84,508.5 in FY 2025-26, is the formula’s own count. It is 4,701.5 fewer than the October membership above, a different count from a different collection.
• 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.
• 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. It lists only the school organizations that exist today, so those years cannot be checked.

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

• The corrections line is the General Fund appropriation to the Sheriff Department, ordinance item 01010-3530000, as enacted each year: read from each year’s signed appropriation ordinance and matched, to the dollar, against that year’s adopted budget book. The next year’s book prints a different figure for the same year, the appropriation as changed during the year, which is not drawn here.
• The Sheriff’s line is not the whole cost of the jails. Health care in the two jails is paid through the Denver Health operating agreement, in its own lines. They are $21,740,490 for acute and chronic care and $5,418,974 for prisoner medical services, both 2026 appropriated. Whether they sit inside or outside the Sheriff’s $174,253,830 is not established from the budget book alone, so they are named here and never added to it. This site never sums components a publisher does not sum.
• Jail is not prison. Denver’s jails hold mostly people awaiting trial or serving short sentences. The People incarcerated /100k measure the state pages publish counts sentenced prisoners under state jurisdiction, a different count of different people, and it is never borrowed for the city: that would publish a state basis under a city label. A Denver jail rate is not published, because the city publishes no custody count: its open-data catalog, 346 datasets, read 27 August 2026, holds no jail or custody population dataset.
• No Vehicle theft rank is shown. The rank orders the 51 state-level jurisdictions by one denominator, and no city is a member of that set, so Denver is given no rank.
• 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. Denver’s rates divide by the population served by the department itself, as the FBI publishes it, instead of the Census count of residents. Both are per resident, so read the distance between the lines, not the last decimal. Agencies covering at least 90% of Colorado’s and the nation’s population reported in every year drawn, except the nation in 2021. That year, national coverage fell below the 90% the site requires, during the national change in how crime is counted, so the U.S. line breaks there.
• The corrections budget has no comparison line. No state or national figure measures what it measures, one city’s appropriation for its own jails. The site never adds or averages one government’s money with another’s.

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