Facilities & Capital Explorer

This explorer looks at the capital side of school-district operations: capital outlay, construction spending, debt interest, and Forest Lake's recent General Fund capital trend. Peer measures are normalized per student because raw capital totals are dominated by district size.

Important context: Capital spending is inherently uneven. A district building or renovating a school can appear dramatically higher in a single year even when that project is planned and financed over decades. One-year peer comparisons should therefore be read as a snapshot, not an efficiency ranking.

Explore the data by

Measure

District

Display as

How to Read the Results

Peer snapshot: NCES fiscal data are reported per student, which makes districts of different sizes more comparable. The available NCES profile currently shows FY2022-23 fiscal data for eight districts and FY2021-22 for North Branch; the data year is shown in every table.

Forest Lake trend: the ten-year series uses audited General Fund capital expenditures divided by MDE ADM for the per-student view. It is a different accounting view than NCES capital outlay, so the historical trend and peer snapshot are intentionally kept separate.

Building age: MDE uses building age in operating-capital and Long-Term Facilities Maintenance calculations. Building age helps explain capital needs, but age alone does not establish facility condition or the necessity of a project.

Sources

NCES Common Core of Data - District Search

Minnesota Department of Education - Facilities and Technology

Forest Lake FY2025 Financial Report and annual FY2016-FY2025 audit series already published on this site.

Ask a question