What the money buys

• The district is not the city. All of Lakewood lies inside it, and it also serves the rest of Jefferson County and a small part of Broomfield. No other school district serves any part of Lakewood, so no second district is 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

• Lakewood runs no jail. Detention is run by the Jefferson County Sheriff, out of the county’s own budget, 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 county’s money is on the dashboard under its 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 adopted budget each year, as each year’s own budget book prints it, never an actual or revised figure. The city lists adopted books back to 2023, and the 2023 book also prints 2022’s adopted budget, so the line starts at 2022.
• 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. Lakewood’s rate divides by the Census count of city residents instead. Both are per resident, so read the distance between the lines, not the last decimal. Agencies covering 99.0% to 99.5% of Colorado’s population reported in every year shown, and 94.8% to 96.4% 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