What the money buys

• The district is not the city, and its boundary does not match the city line. Poudre School District R-1 holds 161,779 of the city’s 169,810 residents (95.3%) and serves 59,223 more people outside it (26.8% of the district’s 221,002 residents). Thompson School District R-2J holds the other 8,031 (4.7%). That is under the 10% this page uses to show a second district, so no second district is shown. The table below the charts lists both.
• 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

• The police figure is the Police Services service area of the city’s budget, all funds. It covers Investigations, Police Information Services, Patrol, Community and Special Services, and the Office of the Chief. The city budgets by outcome area and service area. Poudre Fire Authority is a separate authority that the budget lists on a line of its own, outside Police Services. It is not in this figure. Neither is Colorado State University’s police, which is a different agency.
• The police line is the budget each year’s adopted book prints for that year, never an actual. The city adopts a two-year budget. The 2023-2024 book supplies 2022 (as that book’s previous-year original budget), 2023 and 2024, and the 2025-2026 book supplies 2025 and 2026. The city’s own link to the 2023-2024 book no longer serves it. So that book was read from the Internet Archive’s copy of the city’s file. Its 2024 column matches the 2025-2026 book’s line by line.
• The 2026 figure is the adopted one. Ordinance No. 186, 2025 amended the 2026 budget before the year began, and its Exhibit A lists a reduction of $1,124,897 to Police Services. The ordinance prints no amended Police Services total, so none is shown, and none is derived.
• Fort Collins runs no jail, and the city budgets no corrections function. Detention is run by the Larimer County Sheriff, in the county’s own budget, so a Corrections budget does not exist for the city: it has no corrections budget line to publish, and the police budget is not renamed to fill that slot.
• A People incarcerated /100k figure does not exist for the city either: state counts cover sentenced prisoners under state jurisdiction and have no city row, the city holds nobody, jail is not prison, and no rate is produced. The measure is not eligible at this grain.
• No Vehicle theft rank is shown. The rank orders the 51 state-level jurisdictions, and a city is not one of them, so no rank is produced.
• The Colorado and U.S. lines are the FBI’s own state and national rates: offenses reported by the agencies in the state or the nation, divided by the FBI’s population figure. Fort Collins’ rate divides by the population its police department serves, which the FBI publishes beside the department’s counts. So all three are per person served, but 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 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