Methodology

How claims are labeled

Every significant finding separates what a source says from what we calculate and what we think it might mean. We never present an interpretation or hypothesis as a fact.

Evidence tiers

When two Tier 1 sources disagree — for example, the State Auditor’s dashboard and the audited financial statements — we report both and explain the difference. Transparent Utah notes its data can be raw, unaudited, and unconsolidated.

Which source we use

We prefer centralized Utah government sources over individual district websites whenever they hold equivalent information, because they report every district the same way.

Budget stages

These are different numbers and are never treated as interchangeable:

1. Original (adopted) budget — approved before the fiscal year begins.
2. Final (amended) budget — the budget after amendments during the year.
3. Actual results — what was reported as received and spent.
4. Audited results — actual results after the independent audit.

Budget-vs-actual comparisons on this site use the final budget unless stated otherwise. A single-year variance is common; a repeated pattern is a question worth asking, not a conclusion about financial management.

Scope

The statewide dataset covers Utah’s 41 school districts. Charter schools are in the source files but are excluded until they can be shown with a clear district/charter distinction. The primary analytical period is FY2016–FY2026; older years are kept where available (currently back to FY2012). All dollar figures are nominal until the inflation table is added.

Revenue excludes state Capital Development Project Grants (revenue code 3750) in every year, because USBE’s Tableau extract — our source for FY2012–FY2024 — omits that code. These one-time construction grants went mostly to small rural districts (for example, $18.0M to Piute and $18.1M to Wayne in FY2024); none of Tooele’s initial peers received them in FY2024.

Counting students

Per-student figures use USBE’s October 1 enrollment, the count used for state funding: K-12 students enrolled on October 1 who are Utah residents. FY2015–FY2018 come from USBE’s Enrollment by LEA report and FY2019 onward from Fall Enrollment by Grade Level. We checked Average Daily Membership (ADM), which measures how much of the year each student is enrolled; for the four initial districts it runs within 2% of the October 1 count, so the choice of count does not change the comparisons.

Online programs. Some districts run online schools that enroll students from across the state, and those students count in the district’s enrollment. Because online students generally cost less to serve, a large online program lowers a district’s spending per student, and a change in online enrollment can move per-student figures sharply. We identify these programs by school name and enrollment pattern from USBE’s school-level counts (available from FY2019):

• Tooele: Blue Peak High for FY2019–FY2021, when it housed the online program (2,817 to 9,476 students), then the Digital Education Center (8,332 students in FY2022, 8,882 in FY2023, 263 in FY2024). From FY2022, Blue Peak High has about 120 students and is not counted as online.
• Iron: Southwest Educational Academy and Iron Online.
• Cache and Box Elder: none identified.

This classification is ours, made from names and enrollment patterns; it has not yet been confirmed with the districts. Online programs in the other 37 districts have not been identified, so statewide per-student comparisons should be read with this in mind.

Pay data

Teacher and administrator pay come from the Office of the State Auditor’s Transparent Utah dashboards, built from compensation reports that districts file each year. They are raw and unaudited.

• Teacher pay (Teacher Pay dashboard) covers classroom teachers whose names the Auditor matched to at least one course in USBE’s CACTUS licensing database. The share matched differs by district and has grown over time, so we report pay (medians and percentiles) but not teacher counts or students per teacher, which would be misleading.
• Administrators (Administrator & Teacher Pay dashboard) are employees the Auditor classifies as administrators from job titles and account codes. Districts title positions differently, so headcounts are not perfectly comparable.

Personal information. The Teacher Pay download lists individual teachers by name and license number. We keep those files private and never publish them; the site shows only district-level summaries, and statistics for groups of fewer than 10 teachers are suppressed. The administrator data is already aggregated by the Auditor.

Validation

FY2012–FY2024 figures come from USBE’s Tableau Public data extracts; FY2025 from USBE’s Excel summaries. Both sources cover FY2024, so we compare them for every district: total spending, revenue, property tax, and General Fund balance. Of 164 comparisons, 162 agree to within 0.5% (nearly all exactly). The two exceptions are Provo’s revenue (+0.8%) and General Fund balance (+3.6%), which we have not yet explained. Download the validation results.

We also compared USBE revenue with Transparent Utah. They agree closely for Tooele (within about 1% each year), but differ for some peers — including Iron in FY2021–FY2022 and Cache from FY2020 onward — which is one reason USBE is the primary source.

Traceability

Every published figure can be traced back through each step to a specific cell in a government document.

We keep original source documents, raw and cleaned datasets, transformation scripts, source URLs, and retrieval dates. Historical source data is never overwritten without keeping the original version.

Data cleaning and personal information

Cleaning the data includes removing personal information. Government files often carry the names of the staff who created or last saved them, and some record local file paths that include a user’s name. That information is not part of the published data, so we remove it before a file enters our archive:

• Author and “last modified by” fields in spreadsheet metadata
• Saved-file locations that include a person’s name
• User folders in file paths, and “edited by” notes, inside data-tool workbooks

We do not change any figures or document content. Each removal is logged with the file’s checksum before and after (metadata_redactions.csv), so every file we publish can still be matched to the original government download. We do not publish student-level records.

Standard calculations

Inflation adjustment

Dollar comparisons across years account for inflation. We use the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI-U (U.S. city average, all items), stored locally as an annual series rather than looked up ad hoc.

For example, $1.00 spent in FY2016 is equivalent to about $1.38 in FY2026 dollars, and $1.00 in FY2023 to about $1.09. Download the inflation table.

Dollar charts show nominal dollars by default; use the FY2026 dollars switch on any chart to see inflation-adjusted values. The setting applies to every chart and is remembered on your device. Within a single year, comparisons between districts are unaffected by inflation, so rankings use nominal dollars. CPI-U measures consumer prices nationally; school costs (mostly salaries and benefits) and Utah prices can rise at different rates, so inflation-adjusted figures are an approximation.

How we think about efficiency

We distinguish three things:

1. Financial efficiency — how resources are raised, budgeted, and managed.
2. Operational efficiency — what it costs to deliver services such as transportation, facilities, and administration.
3. Educational effectiveness — the measurable outcomes that accompany spending: graduation, assessment results, growth, and attendance.

Lower spending is not automatically better. Higher spending is not automatically evidence of poor management. Efficiency is about both the resources used and the results achieved.

Research workflow

1. Identify question
2. Locate primary sources
3. Acquire documents
4. Preserve originals
5. Extract data
6. Normalize
7. Validate
8. Compare to history
9. Compare to peers
10. Investigate anomalies
11. Identify alternative explanations
12. Calculate metrics
13. Fact-check
14. Publish methodology
15. Publish findings with sources

Publication standard

Every major analysis answers eight questions:

1. What happened?
2. How large was the change?
3. Why did it happen, if known?
4. How does it compare historically?
5. How does it compare with peer districts?
6. What does the source actually establish?
7. What remains unknown?
8. What additional information would resolve the uncertainty?

Chart standards

• Axes are labeled, with units and fiscal years shown.
• Value axes start at zero unless clearly marked otherwise.
• District comparisons use a shared scale.
• Each district has a fixed color and line style: Tooele yellow (solid), Iron blue (dashed), Cache teal (dotted), Box Elder purple (dash-dot). Yellow marks the subject district — it is not a judgment.
• Every chart has a source line and a table version.