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District unveils internal financial dashboard and plans public portal to improve budget transparency
Summary
The district demonstrated an in-house financial dashboard (data current to April 30) that visualizes key performance indicators, spending "velocity," and special-education trends; staff plan a public-facing portal and will use the tool to spot budget hotspots earlier in the fiscal year.
Bristol Public Schools showed board members a working financial dashboard on May 6 that aggregates budget data and offers interactive charts to track spending, encumbrances and forecasted trends. Director Jeff Telki led the demonstration and said the tool pulls district financials into visualizations that can highlight problem areas earlier in the fiscal year.
Telki described features that include key performance indicators (budget vs. year-to-date spending), monthly expense trends, and a "spending velocity" projection based on historical data. He said the administrative tool is customizable and an upcoming public portal is intended to provide community-facing summaries without requiring logins. "This isn't just a product that we purchase from anywhere. This is costing us basically nothing to run," Telki said of the in-house effort.
Board members discussed practical uses, including drilling into transportation or cafeteria line items and monitoring special-education spending. Telki said the tool can be tuned to provide early warning signals and that an online public portal would be developed over the summer for community access.
Next steps: administration will continue dashboard refinement, expand public-facing displays, and use the tool to monitor fiscal hotspots during the remainder of the fiscal year.
