Project overview

What it is

School board decisions often come with goals: an amount of money saved, a project finished by a date, a reserve kept at a level. Receipts follows each money decision of the Huntington Beach City School Districtthrough three stages. A Brief before the vote, a Receipt at the vote that quotes the district's goal word for word with a review date, and a Stamp at the review date that shares how it turned out, using the district's own public reports. Every quote and number links to the exact page it came from.

Why

"During my summer 2026 internship, I noticed that it's often hard to find out how school plans turned out, from board proposals to plans by admin and clubs."

— Ethan Bell, in his words

By the numbers

• 95board meetings checked
• 47public documents read and linked
• 82citations to an exact page
• 18goals quoted word for word
• 13decisions followed
• 9results published

Live since October 5, 2026. Counted automatically from the records.

What it found

Of the 9 decisions that have reached their review date, 3 are stamped "Goal met" and 1 "Partly met." The other 5 are "Not enough data": the district's standard year-end reports show spending by category, such as all classified salaries together, not by the single position or program a goal was about.

That finding shaped the project. Each of those pages names the one record that would settle it, the Data gaps page groups them by the kind of report that would close them, and a four-line agenda template shows how future goals could be checked automatically.

How it's built

• Written rules first. How we stamp sets out what gets tracked, what counts as evidence, and how each stamp is decided, before any result is published.
• Records as checked data. Each decision is a data file. The site won't build if a record breaks a rule, such as a stamp without evidence.
• Fair to the district. New results are shared with the district 10 business days before publishing, and its perspective is added in its own words.
• Open and accessible. All records download as a spreadsheet or JSON, and every page is checked with automated accessibility tests on phones and computers.
• Honest about tools. AI tools assist with searching the district's public documents and cross-checking quotes and numbers. A person reviews every record and stamp before it's published.

What's next

Receipts is set up so a second district can be added with its own settings file and folder of records. The plan is to bring it to other school districts (coming later), while coverage of the Huntington Beach City School District stays free.