I’m continuing to explore visualizations of budget data for the Watertown, MA municipal departments. My specific interest is in understanding how the current town financial climate impacts the school budget. I have a daughter in kindergarten at the Lowell School so with the current school related uproar I thought I should develop a better understanding what the moving parts are. Thanks to Allie Altman, the business manager for the school, I received a document titled ‘Watertown School Budget Book‘. I cleaned up the data with the help of a tool called Google Refine. My cleaned version of the document, which I used as the source data to create these visualizations can be found here.
MY GOALS FOR THIS VISUALIZATION: Clean the budget book data, identify patterns, summarize and extract a better understanding of what is taking place in the school budget.
To any Town or School Officials – I want to learn more about this data and what it means. If you see inaccuracies or would like to see other information represented like this please use my contact information at the bottom of this page. I’m trying to attend as many Town Council and School Committee meetings as I can. I want to learn more, ask questions of people and engage more in the local government process.
My hope is that by getting a sense of the bigger picture we get a chance to understand that seemingly isolated changes can have a large impact.
- Cell color has meaning, darker cells represent more spending, lighter cells less.
- When you see duplicate line items such as Math, those represent Elementary, Middle, High School. I might roll those up in the future.
- The 4 FY 2012 columns represent budget scenarios from the Superintendent.
- Null/empty fields are a result of missing data in the spreadsheet.
Summary
I find this visualization really pleasing to look at. There is a calm and reassuring feeling about it. When looking at individual line items it is easy to get caught up when the raw numbers swing in the $100,000-$300,000 range. I had a hunch that while those number movements seemed high, that they might not be that significant when viewing the budget from a few hundred feet away. A goal in creating this visualization was to make it easier for me to see the relative change from year to year.
Some things I noticed:
- As expected/known Chapter 766 (SPED) lead the spending pack
- I have/had no idea what the Basic Skills line item is
- There don’t seem to be any violent shifts in spending priority over the past 5 years.
- Smooth incremental changes appear to be the norm.
Some questions I now have:
- I’d like to know how much of each item is staff vs. equipment so I’d like to see the budget book broken down into staff and equipment detail.
- I’d like to break down the administration, operations, teachers, services line items better.
- I’d love to be able to do this type of trending with greater specificity.
- As 766, transportation and basic skills costs continue to climb how do we continue to fund our schools?
Update [04/04/2011]:
Some have asked the reason why the changes are not very noticeable in this graph. I’m pretty sure I have this right but if any information/stats people are looking I’d love to learn how to do this better. I am visually representing relative year to year change not absolute change. So while a change of $100k might be a big change year to year it has to be looked at in how that change relates to all the other changes for that same year.
For example:
- Library/Media changed from FY09 216,896 to $237,078 in FY10 – a $20,000 increase from the previous year.
- SPED 766 changed from FY09 $4,838,787 to $5,553,926 in FY10 – a $715,139 increase from the previous year.
- Music changed from FY09 $200,391 to $231,542 in FY10 – a $31,151 increase from the previous year.
So while Library Media had a 9.2% increase, SPED had a 14% increase. Music had the biggest gain at 15%. For these three examples the range of % increase is only 5.8. We have to compare that to the overall budget shift. The total budget for FY09 was $31,478,072 and in FY10 $33,004,426. The overall budget increased by 5%.
So yes in this graph you won’t see major program changes year-to-year which I think when it comes to the overall budget is probably a good thing. I’ll try to work on another graph that more easily represents who ‘won’ and ‘lost’ the most in each year compared to the overall budget shift.
If you have questions about these charts or have suggestions about where to explore next, please join the conversation at this Facebook group: Watertown Parents for Strong Schools
