The Ledger · Instrument · Issue No. 003 in production

Did your district cut?

State totals fell after the stimulus and then went back up. Most districts did not. These are the payment records. Find your district and see what it actually did between FY2023 and FY2025.

All four states Delaware · 29 Maryland · 23 Utah · 145 West Virginia · 51

Start typing, or pick a state to browse.

What the 248 comparable districts did

A district is comparable when it has recorded canonical-vendor spend in FY2023 and any FY2025 record. Of the 275 districts in the four-state universe, 27 are not comparable and are reported separately rather than dropped.

46%
cut spending by more than 10 percent. 115 of 248 districts.
35%
cut by more than a quarter. 87 districts.
44%
grew spending by more than 10 percent. 108 districts.
0
years in which platform and system spending fell, FY2019 through FY2025.

The finding, stated so you can disagree with it

Districts are not holding the line on technology spending. 46 percent of them cut what they pay named education vendors by more than a tenth in two years. What never got cut, in any year since 2019, is the platform layer.

Platform and system spending across these four states rose from $13.9 million in FY2019 to $34.5 million in FY2025, without a single down year, while supplemental and core categories fell from their FY2022 peaks. If you think that reading is wrong, the district-level file is public and so is ours.

StateComparable districtsCut >10%Cut >25%Grew >10%Cut share
Delaware2915111052%
Maryland23751430%
Utah14570546148%
West Virginia5123172345%
All four2481158710846%

Where this number comes from

Source
State vendor payment disclosures published by Utah, Maryland, West Virginia and Delaware. Public records, no survey and no estimate.
What is counted
Payments to vendors PILLAR has matched to a canonical identity through documented, reviewed rules. Named instructional, assessment and platform providers. Hardware and device refresh are excluded.
Years compared
FY2023 against FY2025, the two most recent fiscal years complete across all four states. FY2026 is still filling and is never quoted.
Disclosure floors
Maryland publishes payments at or above $25,000 by statute. Utah is filtered at $1,000 on ingest. Spend below those floors is invisible to this record in those states.
Known limit
District totals are lumpy, because curriculum is bought on adoption cycles rather than evenly. That is why this reports threshold shares rather than averages, and why a single district's move is weaker evidence than the distribution.
Query
LEDGER_Q_DISTRICT_CUT_SHARE_v1, production run 2026-08-22. Development environment verified at parity on the same date.
Think a figure here is wrong? Pull your state's disclosure file and check it. If you find a material error we will publish the correction with your name on it. The standing bounty and the correction log.

Take it and use it

Nothing here needs permission or attribution beyond the source line

The finding travels better when other people carry it than when we repeat it. Both charts are built from the same query as this page, print their own source line, and are free to reuse.

Bar chart. Of 247 comparable school districts across Utah, Maryland, West Virginia and Delaware, 86 cut vendor spending by more than 25 percent, 30 cut by 10 to 25 percent, 26 held within 10 percent, and 105 grew by more than 10 percent.
What the 248 districts did. Download
Line chart of spending by category across four states, FY2019 to FY2025. Platforms and systems rise every year from 11.8 million to 34.5 million dollars. Core curriculum and supplemental spending both fall from FY2022 peaks.
The layer that never got cut. Download
The number

46 percent of 248 school districts cut what they pay named education vendors by more than 10 percent between FY2023 and FY2025.

The reversal

The cut was real and it was brief. FY2023 is the trough in these records, and by FY2025 supplemental spending is at an all-time high while core curriculum has recovered most of the way. Platform and system spending is the exception in the other direction: it never fell in any year from FY2019 to FY2025.

What has to travel with it

Four states only. Canonical-matched instructional, assessment and platform vendors, no hardware. Maryland discloses at or above $25,000 by statute. District totals are lumpy because curriculum is bought on adoption cycles, which is why this reports threshold shares rather than averages.

carry-kit.json has all of it in machine-readable form, alongside districts.json, segment-trend.json and state-fy-totals.json.