The short version
Three RCSD-authorized charter schools — Connect Community Charter, KIPP Excelencia, and Rocketship Redwood City Prep — now have their own pages on the site. The /schools/ index got reorganized into three sections: district schools, charters, and other district property. And I fixed an embarrassing omission in the MCP tool that was making board meetings look emptier than they are.
Charter schools on the site
RCSD authorizes three charter schools and provides their fiscal oversight. Every year the district reviews their adopted budgets, interim reports, and unaudited actuals, and publishes review letters. All of that is public record in board packets, and none of it was easy to find.
Each charter page now has CDE metadata (CDS code, charter number, date opened), contact info, school leadership (with photos where I could get them), social links, a financial-document timeline that pairs each charter-submitted report with RCSD's review letter, and the IRS Form 990 filing for whichever entity files it. Connect files its own 990 as a standalone 501(c)(3); KIPP and Rocketship file through their network parents, so the figures reflect the whole network rather than just the Redwood City school.
One thing worth being explicit about: authorizing a charter is not the same as operating it. RCSD is the authorizer for these three schools, which means the district reviews their financials and renews their charter periodically. But each charter is a separate 501(c)(3) with its own board, its own staff, and its own programs. The pages make that relationship explicit.
The three-section /schools/ index
The old /schools/ page only listed the 12 district-operated schools. Now it has three sections:
- District schools — the 12 you knew
- Charter schools — the three RCSD authorizes
- Other district property — four buildings that belong to the district but aren't RCSD-operated schools: the District Office at 750 Bradford, the former Adelante campus at 3150 Granger Way (now leased to Harper School), the former Orion campus at 815 Allerton (now the Creative Learning Center), and a leased-in storage warehouse on East Bayshore
Most of that last section was a surprise to me when I started mapping it out. The district owns more real estate than I'd assumed, including buildings we lease out to other tenants. Worth making public.
The MCP fix
Less visible, but the thing that actually prompted tonight's work.
The site has an MCP server that lets AI assistants query board-meeting data. I was using it to prep questions for this week's board meeting and kept hitting the same wall: I'd ask about an agenda item and the tool would return the title, the attached PDFs, and essentially nothing else. If the item was "Approval of HVAC Upgrades Projects Phase 3," that's what I got. The title.
Except the Simbli agenda item has a body underneath the title with Quick Summary, Recommendation, Rationale, and Financial Impact. For Phase 3 that body says $18.75M total, funded from Measure S, construction targeted for Summer 2027, 25% soft-cost allocation, pending approval the district will issue an architectural RFP. All of that was sitting in the scraped data on disk. The MCP tool just never read it.
Fixed tonight. I should have caught this months ago.
What's next
Scraping and indexing School Site Council (SSC) agendas and minutes per school, starting with Orion's public Google Drive folder. SSCs are the governance bodies that approve each school's Plan for Student Achievement (SPSA) and sit through site-level budget decisions. Under the Greene Act they're open meetings with public records, but in practice most schools don't post their documents anywhere discoverable. That changes the moment someone indexes them.
Also on the list: CAASPP trend data by school and demographic group, cross-district comparisons, and extending the audit-report classifier so charter independent audits auto-link to their review letters instead of showing a "see meeting for report" caveat.
If something on the site is wrong or missing, [email protected] or GitHub.