by Nick Cimillo '26 and Loretta Garcia '27
Last updated on December 5, 2025
for EDUC 206 - Data Visualization for Allwith Prof. Jack DoughertyTrinity College, Hartford CT, USA
The School + State Finance Project is a non-profit organization whose stated aim is to work with Connecticut policymakers to eliminate disparities in funding education funding across the state. This work includes addressing and researching how funding varies across districts based on certain student enrollment demographics, such as being low-income, a multilingual learner, or having a disability. But the project’s main focus, as well as that of this data story, is school funding gaps along racial/ethnic lines; as the project has found, decades of exclusionary policies and laws have left Connecticut segregated, with the state’s towns that have the highest percentages of Black, Indigenous, Latino, and any other person of color (BILPOC) residents frequently having some of the lowest median household incomes in the state (School and State Finance Project).
Our work here continues from this question of how state spending varies across Connecticut school districts, particularly by using spending per enrolled student as a metric. While much of the groundwork regarding this question has been laid by the School + State Finance Project, we hope to offer a more regional analysis by studying similar data in the neighboring state of Massachusetts. By expanding our scope of analysis to southern New England in this way, we found patterns between these two states that might pave the way for researching new potential remedies. Our hope for this work is to raise awareness of financial inequality that impacts a broader swath of American youths.
When considering both Connecticut and Massachusetts, it is important first to look at the states separately. Beginning with Connecticut, we started with general data about both BILPOC populations across the state as well as median household income, a metric that we used as a measure of each Connecticut town’s comparative wealth.
The two maps below reveal a striking pattern: the areas in the state that have the highest percentages of BILPOC populations also frequently have the lowest median household incomes.
(Figure 1): A map of Connecticut which allows you to switch between seeing each town’s BILPOC population and median household income.
One of the most obvious places where this pattern is evident is in the center of the state with Hartford; with one of the highest BILPOC populations in Connecticut, it also has the lowest median household income at $45,000. Conversely, Darien, in the southeast corner of the state, has a relatively low BILPOC population at 15.7%, while having a median household income of over $250,000. Generally, the darkest areas on the BILPOC population map (indicating a high population) are the lightest on the income map (indicating a low income).
The maps serve as a good guiding post towards specific school districts we can look at in the state. The district data we found pertained to student enrollment in the state’s school districts by race, as well as a per pupil expenditure (PPE) amount, which is a rough calculation of how much a district spends per enrolled student.
The table below shows the PPE and percent BILPOC student enrollment for all of Connecticut’s school districts.
(Figure 2): Table featuring Connecticut school districts’ PPE and percent BILPOC enrollment.
Falling in line with the patterns revealed in the maps, the town school districts for areas located in the high BILPOC, low income areas of the state are among the last in this sorted table, which corresponds to high BILPOC, low PPE school districts. Continuing with Hartford and Darien as examples, Hartford School District can be seen in the table with a 93.41% BILPOC enrollment and a PPE of $23,095. On the other hand, Darien School District has a much lower BILPOC enrollment of 19.23% and one of the higher PPE amounts at $25,891.
Charting all of these school districts out below, we found that there is a slight negative relationship between percent BILPOC enrollment and PPE: in other words, as the former increases, the latter decreases.
(Figure 3): Scatterplot chart comparing Connecticut school districts’ BILPOC enrollment (x-axis) and PPE (y-axis). The black trend line reveals a correlation of -0.31.
These data and visualizations reveal a pattern of disparity: just as towns in Connecticut with high BILPOC populations have lower incomes, their school districts, which have higher amounts of BILPOC students enrolled, receive less funding.
The first map below reveals that some of the towns in Massachusetts with the highest median household income are in the eastern half of the state, mainly surrounding Boston. The second map showing the percentage of BILPOC student enrollment, reveals that these wealthy suburbs routinely have lower percentages of BILPOC students enrolled in their local districts. Take Tewksbury; the first map reveals it to have a median household income of $234.6K, while the second map shows that its town school district has a BILPOC enrollment of only 22.2%. Similarly, Wilmington, which has one of the highest median incomes at $250k, has a BILPOC enrollment of 19.7%.
(Figure 4): A map of median household income in Massachusetts towns and the percent BILPOC population.
Some of MA’s school districts are regional, and thus could not be placed precisely on the state map. Others are charter school districts, which routinely have very high percentages of BILPOC students. An interesting example can be seen with the Foxborough Regional Charter district, which has a rather high BILPOC enrollment of 85.3%. However the town’s school district has only 27.3% BILPOC enrollment, and its median household income is also one of the highest visible on the map at $250k. This observation calls into question whether or not these regional/charter districts, which seem predominantly BILPOC, have similar levels of school funding as predominantly white ones, even when they’re within the same region.
The table below shows the PPE and percent BILPOC student enrollment for all of Massachusetts’s school districts.
(Figure 5): A table showing the the percent of BILPOC student enrollment
The †ables data mirrors tha† of the map in that the areas tha† are densely BILPOC in Massachusetts also have a high percentage of BILPOC student enrollment. This is, with the exception of Charter schools, which often span multiple districts.
The Scatterplot below's trend line reveals that there is a slightly positive relationship of 0.19 between per pupil expenditure and BILPOC student percentage. This indicates that the more BILPOC students a district has enrolled the more money they put into the district.
(Figure 6): A scatter plot showing the correlation between PPE and BILPOC enrollment
The data indicates that the more BILPOC students a district in Massachusetts has enrolled the more money they put into the district. This is the opposite of what we see in Connecticut. The data shows that even if the change is slight in both directions, overall Massachusetts is spending more in districts with higher BILPOC student percentages than Connecticut for the same percentage of BILPOC students. Looking at the map of Massachusetts, meanwhile, will help you see the BILPOC population across the state with a visual representation of the diversity in the state. The chart will allow you to see the percentage of racial diversity by enrollment in each district
We found data for Connecticut by going to EdSight . After going to EDSight, we were able to find the data we needed and download it directly. We then put them into Google Sheets and cleaned up the data as necessary. The Connecticut data was then cleaned up and calculations were made to obtain the specific kind of data we’re looking for: the amount of BILPOC students in each district, which we then used to calculate the percentage of BILPOC students enrolled. The main thing that we knew would be a struggle was making sure that we are giving accurate data by normalizing the data and ensuring that definitions of BILPOC for both states are the same.
Our data for Massachusetts came from ACS Social Explores as well as the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Our step by step visualizations allows the reader to walk through the way that funding is allocated and truly see the disparities through multiple visualizations. These could not easily be overlaid onto one visualization because some of Massachusetts’s school districts don’t have clear geographic boundaries, being regional instead of within a town’s boundaries. The way in which we can show the reader how to go through and the correlation that the scatterplot shows would not have the same effect any other way.
School + State Finance Finance, https://schoolstatefinance.org/issues/segregated-connecticut ACS Social Explorer, 5-Year Estimates 2019-2023, CT and MA County Subdivisions https://www.socialexplorer.com/explore-tables CT EdSight, Per Pupil Expenditure, https://public-edsight.ct.gov/overview/per-pupil-expenditures-by-function---district?language=en_US CT EdSight, Enrollment Report, 2023-24, All Districts, filtered by race, https://public-edsight.ct.gov/students/enrollment-dashboard/enrollment-report-legacy?language=en_US