The money

How the money actually moves

Where every dollar comes from, what it buys, and where the published record stops being able to say. What the town should do about any of it is on Solutions.

Where the money comes from

The whole thing, drawn

Every source the town budgets, every account the schools spend from, and the join in the middle that no record makes.

The reports

Each takes one question as far as the published records carry it, then says where it stops.

How to check any of it

What is not in here

What we cannot answer →266 questions this project went looking for and could not settle from the published records, each with the document that would close it.

Going further

The routes in detail — which one exactly, who signs, how the ledger is named.

What a budget line is, and is not

A budget line is not what a thing costs. It is what the town has to raise — what is left after state aid, grants, fees and the district’s own revolving funds have paid their share. The budget documents show that one number and none of the others.

So a line can rise because the thing got more expensive, because a grant that was paying part of it ended, or because a fee stopped being collected — and all three look identical on the page. Beside general education transportation the district’s own workbook asks, in its comments column, whether that line already reflects a reduction for money expected from busing fees — and nothing on the page marks which other lines are net of anything.

These pages are about the routes, not about what to do next. Where a route can be followed in the town’s ledger, they follow it. Where it cannot, they say where it stops instead of estimating across the gap. Nothing here tells you which source paid for which line: money in the general fund loses its origin on arrival, and no record in the archive puts it back. Written by this project, not by the town or the district. Every figure on these pages is computed from sources/data/lunenburg.db or from the documents in the archive, and a page with no generator listed is hand-written — its figures were true when it was written and nothing checks that they still are.

What changed

Version 15 — updated September 20, 2026