READING THE FIGURES
Methods & definitions.
Periods and budget stages
Calendar years, school fiscal years, assessment snapshots, and school-year observations remain separate. Proposed, adopted, revised, original-budget, and actual amounts are distinct. Comparisons use the same measure, entity, fund, and reporting basis.
Missing observations and changes
Missing values remain unavailable. Explicit printed zeros remain zeros. Charts do not interpolate missing years. Annual percentage change requires consecutive years and a positive prior value. Compare trends shows relative percentage changes in dollars or counts from the same reference year for every line. The reference is the earliest year with a positive reported value for every series. When the original measure is a percentage rate, the Change (percentage points) view instead subtracts the reference rate; zero rates are valid references. For example, 11.8% to 9.9% is a decline of 1.9 percentage points. The reference stays fixed when changing the range or hiding a line. The horizontal 0% or 0 pp line represents that reference. Earlier and later observations use the same comparison year. Source-definition changes still matter.
Chart scales and dates
Dollar totals include zero on their axes. Comparison views show a clear zero reference, labeled in percent or percentage points to match the measure. Tick values use rounded intervals. The on-roll enrollment chart initially uses a focused scale to make small changes readable; its starting value is disclosed beside the chart, and a control restores zero. Calendar years, fiscal years ending in the labeled year, and full school-year periods are identified on the time axis.
Inflation
The Inflation adjusted view uses 2024 as its reference year and annual averages of seasonally adjusted CPI-U (FRED CPIAUCSL). An annual factor requires all twelve monthly observations. The source series has no October 2025 observation, so this method does not produce a 2025 annual factor. Incomplete 2026 data also remain outside annual adjustments. Fiscal-year amounts use the calendar CPI for the ending-year key; the result is a standardized comparison rather than a fiscal-month price index.
Staffing and enrollment
Headcounts and full-time equivalents (FTE) are distinct. The school ACFR statistical staffing schedule includes some aides within instructional functions, and child care first enters the reported total in 2022. Enrollment definitions and observation dates differ across school reports. Statistical schedules are labeled unaudited even when published within an annual financial report.
The federal history uses primary NCES district files. Its teacher FTE excludes aides, which belong to other staff. Other staff is the reported all-staff total less teachers, or the sum of complete nonoverlapping categories. Missing individual roles stay unavailable even when a published aggregate permits that subtraction. Older fixed-width files use their own record layouts and implied decimals; newer decimal FTE is preserved without integer truncation. Federal school-year keys label the ending year and are not substituted for district fiscal schedules.
Federal school-finance history
Census F-33 financial years are fiscal years ending in the labeled year. Money cells in the original All Data Items files are in thousands of dollars and are converted to dollars; membership remains a count. Reported, adjusted, imputed, missing and not-applicable flags remain distinct. Definitions come from the matching report vintage. The published 1993 and 1994 files do not contain this district, so those years remain gaps.
Federal totals have a different scope from district UFB current expense and C-1 budgetary comparisons. New Jersey state-paid pension and Social Security contributions enter federal revenue and expenditure totals. They must not be treated as spending paid entirely through local property taxes. Federal finance series are presented separately, and their source rows retain the state-paid contribution fields.
Accounting balances and funding
Municipal regulatory statements and school GAAP statements use different conventions. Current Fund statement totals can include tax collections for other taxing bodies. Reported income can include appropriated balance or accounting credits. Balances are not synonymous with cash or unconditional spending authority.
Budget use in audits
The audit charts retain original budgets, budgets after changes, and charged or encumbered amounts. Where encumbrances have their own column, they are added to the reported expended total once. Earlier paid-or-charged totals already include them. These regulatory amounts include accounting transfers and deferred charges; Current Fund totals also include the reserve for uncollected taxes. They are not cash payments or GAAP expense.
Reserved, cancelled and overexpended amounts remain separate in the downloads. An overexpended line can coexist with unused amounts elsewhere, so modified budget less recorded use is not a stand-alone measure of savings. Some printed salary and other-expense subtotals contain classification discrepancies; the source values are preserved and are not used as reconciled payroll or tax-allocation inputs. The captured 2012 audit omits the borough expenditure grand-total page, while its utility schedule is available.
Property-tax calculation
Estimated tax equals assessed value multiplied by the certified rate divided by 100. The calculator uses published component rates, with published-rate rounding identified when applicable. It excludes property-specific adjustments. The total is rounded to cents, then cents are apportioned across components and spending estimates so the displayed lines add to the total. A rounding cent can move between estimated components. Detailed allocations use an explicitly stated spending mix and do not trace individual payments.
The county model excludes identified restricted program appropriations and state-aid college debt before allocating the general county component proportionally. County library, health and open-space components remain separate. School salary detail is unavailable where both overlapping fiscal budgets and their levy purposes cannot be reconciled.
Property-sales snapshots
State sales-file reporting years are separate from individual deed and recording dates. A current snapshot is partial and can include nominal-price transfers, different use classes and transactions that are unsuitable for a market-price comparison. The latest snapshot is not appended to the complete calendar-year series. Treasury SR1A and MOD IV use municipality code 1525 for Point Pleasant Borough; source-specific DCA identifiers are not substituted.
Scenarios and interpretation
Interactive assumptions produce conditional arithmetic, not official forecasts. Spending changes do not automatically become levy changes. Correlations, coincident trends, staffing ratios, and changes in outcomes do not establish causation or by themselves establish a policy recommendation.
Download coverage labels
Download descriptions identify the records and measures in each file. Coverage labels use reviewed reporting fields, not financial amounts or years found in free text. A range shows the earliest and latest represented periods; individual measures can have gaps. School and fiscal ending-year labels remain distinct from calendar years, assessment years, recording dates and forecast years.
A report edition is not the complete observation range of its historical tables. Raw document excerpts and mixed worksheet periods receive an explicit context label instead of an inferred financial range. The newest sales snapshot uses its actual recording-date bounds, not its future source-file year. The labels describe existing records and do not change their values or the collection cutoff.
Sources and revisions
Official source documents remain authoritative. Source vintages and discrepancies remain in the underlying records. Source coverage and unavailable records are documented; completeness of an identified archive does not establish exhaustive coverage of every possible web source.