org.lunenburgbudgetproject/archive

Tools

• budget_history

  What a school budget line was in each year, AT ONE STAGE. The stage argument is required and singular on purpose: `proposed`, `settled` and `actual` are three different documents about the same year, and a growth rate measured from an actual to a budget is partly growth and partly the step between them. That mistake put a special education escalator 1.5 points too high here and was invisible until somebody asked how the number was derived. Note also that a budget line is NET — what the town must raise after grants, fees and state aid — so a line can rise because a grant ended rather than because anything cost more.

  shallow
• document

  Where a document came from: the publisher's URL, our copy, and its sha256 so a reader can check they have the same bytes. Use it to cite anything.

  shallow
• list_datasets

  Every dataset in the archive, with THE YEARS EACH COVERS, its row count and its size. Call this before answering from prose: it is how you find out whether the archive holds data for the year and subject you are being asked about. 49 datasets covering the town and school budgets, the town ledger, staff rosters, out-of-district placements, elections, and fifteen years of annual town reports.

  shallow
• query

  Any question the other tools do not cover, as one read-only SQL statement over the archive database. SELECT or WITH only; a LIMIT is imposed if you omit one. Call `read_first` before computing anything and `list_datasets` to find table names. A query estimated to read more than 250,000 rows is refused — narrow it with a WHERE, or ask for one table at a time.

  shallow
• read_first

  The grain of every table and the specific ways to get a confident wrong answer out of this data. Read this before computing anything. It states, among others, that a budget and an actual must never be combined in one calculation; that a budget line is NET of grants and fees and is not what a thing costs; and that no budget line is mapped to a ledger account, so budget-to-actual at line level cannot be answered from this data at all.

  shallow
• search_meetings

  Which of the 1,422 published town meeting documents contain a word — every board, 2025 onward. Returns the board, the date and a citable URL for each. AN EMPTY RESULT MEANS THE WORD IS NOT IN THE INDEXED DOCUMENTS, which is not the same as nobody having said it: the archive starts in January 2025. It matches words exactly, so plurals are separate terms — search "jersey" and "jerseys" both.

  shallow
• staff

  How many people the town PRINTED on a school staff roster, by year, school and kind of job. Uses our classification of the printed title, never the title itself, because the town has called the same job Tutor, Aide, Paraprofessional, Para, (para) and Sped Para across fifteen years. THIS IS A COUNT OF NAMES, NOT A STAFFING LEVEL: a roster carries no FTE, so a 0.4 music teacher and a full-timer are one row each, and it names no funding source, which is the question that usually matters. Grade appears only where the page happened to print it.

  shallow
• worked_examples

  107 questions this archive can answer, each with the SQL that answers it. Every one is executed against the database on every build, so none of them is a claim. Start from the nearest one and edit it rather than writing a query from scratch.

  shallow

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