Quick note on the FY18 circuit breaker (with an update!)

From today's MASBO update from Jay Sullivan: the FY18 special education circuit breaker is expected to be 65%. The circuit breaker reimburses districts for out-of-district special education tuitions of a particularly high amount.

If that sounds low to you, here's why (charts are the work of MassBudget, which has great stuff on their Budget Browser:

That's $281M for FY18.

Yes, that is down (about $2M) from last year. And costs keep rising for districts, so there are more applications for less money.

If that's less than you were expecting, it was higher in earlier iterations of the budget:

Not good news. 

UPDATE: I got a question late last week about this, and I thought the answer might be of more general interest. A school committee member asked me, "How do I know what this means to my district?"
Great question!
To back up a step or two: every district budget is created based on projections of how much money is coming in the next year (and from where) and how much money will be spent next year (and to where). Thus, in every district that qualifies for circuit breaker, someone in the finance office sat down at some point and said, "Next year, I think out of district tuition will cost X, and I think we'll get Y back in circuit breaker reimbursement."
Now, I would also tell you that you should be able to find this written down somewhere:

This might be made explicit in your budget.
(Clears throat)
For example, @worcesterpublic's (p.11, should you want to go look) pic.twitter.com/hDOGZfgv9X

— Tracy Novick (@TracyNovick) September 17, 2017

If not, this is a perfectly legitimate question for a school committee member to ask during budget deliberations.
Since it now has changed, it is now a perfect legitimate series of questions to ask to discover: what percentage did we project circuit breaker as? And that was how much? And it now being 65% means it now is what?
And, as those are budgetary questions being asked, that should all be public information.