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Our Mission Statement:

Hamilton and Wenham residents who work to strengthen our community by gathering and disseminating information on important community issues.

Our goal is to enable citizens to become more informed about, and more involved in shaping the quality of life in our towns.

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Introduction

Citizens for a Strong Community (CSC) is a volunteer group of residents in Hamilton and Wenham, Massachusetts working to strengthen our towns by gathering and disseminating information on important community issues. Our goal is to enable citizens to become more informed about, and more involved in shaping the quality of life in our towns.  This report is the CSC’s effort to collect, synthesize, and present information to help citizens compare selected communities in Eastern Massachusetts on a variety of school district and town measures, all from credible, publicly-available sources. 

Methodology

Since CSC is based in Hamilton and Wenham, our primary interest in producing this report is to understand how our towns and regional school district compare with a similar group of Massachusetts communities.  To that end, our comparison group was chosen based on four criteria:

1.      Towns with geographic proximity to Hamilton and Wenham.  All towns contiguous to Hamilton and Wenham are included.

2.      Towns with similar demographics to Hamilton and Wenham.

3.      School districts comprising the standard set of fourteen the Hamilton-Wenham School District uses for comparison purposes.

4.      Additional towns to provide a broader comparative benchmark.

Based on those criteria, the following 38 towns and their school districts comprise our comparison group: 

After deciding our comparison group, our next decision was which sources of information to use as the foundation of our study.  We decided to use publicly-available sources of data from the Massachusetts Department of Education (MADOE) (www.doe.mass.edu), and the Massachusetts Department of Revenue (MADOR) (www.dor.state.ma.us).  In addition, the April 2004 Boston Magazine article “The Best Places to Live” assembled a wide range of information from a number of public sources, including the U.S. Census, Mass DOE and DOR, Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, Massachusetts State Police, Massachusetts Office of Child Care Services, and Banker & Tradesman (for median home prices).  We included some data from that issue of the Boston Magazine (www.bostonmagazine.com) when we determined it met our “criteria for inclusion”, noted below.

The next challenge we faced was to decide which measures were the most relevant.  We included measures meeting one or a combination of the following criteria: 

§         Commonly used – measures which citizens commonly use to compare towns, such as median home prices, residential tax bills, average teacher salaries, MCAS scores and SAT scores.

§         Professionally used – measures which municipal and school officials typically use, such as “Residential Plus Open Space Levy as a Percent of Total Municipal Spending”, and “Total Spending per Pupil”

§         Clearly understood – for example, we did not include “Student:Teacher Ratio”, because it is reported inconsistently from school district to school district, and is often misconstrued to mean the same as “Average Class Size”, which it isn’t.

§         Widely available – if a measure was not available for the vast majority of communities in our study, we did not include it.

§         Recent – measures for which data was available for FY 2003, or FY 2002 at the latest.  The only exception was “Income per Capita”, where the most recent figures available from MA DOR were for FY 1999.

§         Consistent – where possible, we present both the most recent measure, as well as an average of that measure over a period of time to smooth anomalies that may result in single year figures.

Specific sources, time periods, definitions and calculations for each measure are noted in the report below their respective graphs. 

We collected data from February through April, 2004.  A number of CSC volunteers served as the primary data collectors, assemblers, and report writers.  We diligently reviewed the information, double-checked its accuracy by comparing our data set to its original source, and paid special attention to the quality and integrity of the data throughout the project.  In some cases we calculated figures from the raw data to compute averages over multiple years and percent changes over various time periods. 

We feel confident the data is as true a representation of the original source as we could achieve, and that the calculations are consistent and accurate.  We also acknowledge there may be an occasional, inadvertent data error.  Should the careful reader uncover any errors, we encourage you to contact us at info@hwcsc.org and we will investigate and make corrections as soon as possible. 

The report is presented in three sections: 

Section A summarizes each measure for Hamilton and Wenham, and profiles those two towns by presenting their data as well as the percentile that data represents within the larger comparison group. 

Section B presents graphs and commentary for school district measures 

Section C presents graphs and commentary for town measures 

We have attempted to present the data and commentary in a straight-forward, factual fashion.  To provide a relevant context, in most instances we note Hamilton and Wenham’s percentile[1] ranking relative to the comparison group. 

We encourage readers of the report to be intelligent consumers of the data, asking questions about what the information is telling them, and thinking critically about the implications.  We caution you to view the entire report as a consistent whole, versus picking one piece of data in isolation that seems to support your point of view.  Finally, we acknowledge there are many other factors impossible to measure that, together with the quantitative metrics in this report, constitute the true worth and quality of life in each of our communities. 

Please contact Citizens for a Strong Community at info@hwcsc.org with questions, comments, and suggestions. 

Note:  CSC is also conducting a School District Comparison Study, which seeks a much wider array of information directly from these same school districts and towns.  The information collected will be stored in a searchable database that will generate reports quickly and easily and can be exported into Excel spreadsheets for further manipulation.  All participating districts will have access to this extensive database, and to all reports that CSC generates.

[1] Percentile - a value on a scale of one hundred that indicates the percent of a distribution that is equal to or below it

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