The 2026 Update of Understanding Your Neighborhood Schools dashboards, developed by Worcester Regional Research Bureau in partnership with Worcester Education Collaborative, use 2025-2026 enrollment data for the Worcester Public Schools, MSBA 2025 survey data, as well as data from the 2024 5-YR American Community Survey to provide interactive dashboards that serve as a valuable resource for families, policymakers, and educators, offering a comprehensive view of each school in the WPS District.

The Opportunity Zone (OZ) program uses federal tax incentives to encourage private investment in low-income communities and was made into a permanent, decennial program through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 (OBBBA). This brief shifts attention to the next round of OZ designations and examining all 49 OZ eligible census tracts across Worcester County, including the 26 in the City of Worcester.

The Worcester Regional Research Bureau has long analyzed data on elections and voting in Worcester. This dashboard continues by analyzing November 2025's municipal results. This series of maps of the results of Worcester's 2025 municipal election, are organized into "overall" and "district" and "at-large" elections. In general, there are maps for each of the candidates that won an election, but clicking on individual precincts will give information about vote margins, comparisons to 2023, and all other candidates in the election.

Worcester Regional Research Bureau in partnership with Worcester Education Collaborative (WEC) developed an interactive Tableau dashboard that displays progress on Our Promise to the Future, the Worcester Public Schools’ 2023–2028 Strategic Plan. The dashboard is designed to help the public understand progress to date on the district’s more than 50 performance indicators. The accompanying brief explains what the strategic plan is, how it was created, and summarizes key findings form the district’s early progress monitoring data.

In collaboration with the Worcester Business Journal, "Cashing in on Cannabis" shows the growth of excise tax collection on cannabis sales across Worcester County.

The Worcester Public Library (WPL) has been in continual existence since late 1859, when the City Council adopted an ordinance to establish it and accept a gift from Dr. John Green III and the Worcester Lyceum and Library Association of 7,000 and 4,000 books respectively.

The inaugural edition of Insights Insider, “Introducing Worcester County Insights”, explores the datasets that are used in the dashboard, highlights the dashboard's useful features and sample visualizations, and notes its value to specific stakeholders such as municipal officials, not-for-profits, businesses, community or advocacy organizations, higher education institutions, and more.

The WRRB's Broadband Explorer is an interactive tool to show broadband status and other selected data on a Census Tract by Census Tract basis (or Zip Code if only available) for households in Auburn, Boylston, Grafton, Holden, Leicester, Millbury, Paxton, Shrewsbury, West Boylston, and Worcester.

Introduction: As of the 2023-24 academic year, Worcester Public Schools (WPS) enrolls an impressive 24,350 scholars across 45 elementary, middle, and high schools collectively.

This StoryMap presents Worcester's preliminary and general municipal elections between 2013 and 2023, with a special focus on individual races in  2021 and 2023.