Every dollar your school district spends is documented, filed, and sitting in a government database. So is your city's budget, your county's infrastructure spending, and dozens of other datasets that describe how public money moves. CivicsData is being built to make all of it readable for parents, journalists, school board members, and researchers.
No spam. Just a note when it launches.
Public data is technically open, but technical access is not the same as real access. A 300,000-row spreadsheet of account codes, published one fiscal year at a time, is open. A tool that lets any resident compare their district to the one next door, across a decade, is accessible. There is a wide gap between those two things, and CivicsData is being built to close it.
Minnesota school districts file detailed finance reports every year, one fiscal year at a time. We stitch those filings into a single timeline anyone can explore, revealing trends and shifts that a single-year snapshot hides completely.
See how any two Minnesota districts allocate their budgets, side by side, over time. Where the numbers differ and where they converge tells a story that residents deserve to see for themselves.
Instead of raw UFARS codes and fund accounting jargon, clear information about where your district puts its money and how that has shifted over time.
Minnesota districts, charters and co-ops in the underlying data; 24 profiled so far
Of district spending, FY2015 to FY2025 — every year the state publishes in this format
Cost to use CivicsData, ever. Public data belongs to the public and should be readable by the public.
“An informed citizenry is at the heart of a dynamic democracy.”Thomas Jefferson
Beyond education. School finance is where CivicsData begins because the data is rich, the stakes are local, and the gap between what exists and what is readable is wide. The same gap exists in municipal budgets, county infrastructure spending, public health data, and more. The infrastructure being built here is designed to work across all of it.