The short version
Every month the Board of Trustees approves a "warrant register" — the list of every check the district issued that month. These are public records, but they live as PDFs buried in board-meeting packets, one month at a time, thousands of rows each. Good luck adding up a year, let alone a decade.
So we added them up. There's a new Vendor Spending page, linked from the Budget section: type a vendor's name and see how much the district has paid them, broken out by fiscal year, going back to 2014. Search "Sodexo," "PG&E," or your kid's after-school program and you'll have the answer in a second.
One thing to understand first
These are accounts-payable warrants — payments to vendors, contractors, and benefits. They do not include employee salaries. Payroll is by far the district's largest expense and runs on a separate system, so the big total on the page is real money we paid out, but it is not the whole budget. The Budget page is the place for the budget picture; this is its itemized, check-by-check companion.
Are we spending a lot more than we used to?
That was my first question when I saw the totals climb from about $30 million a year a decade ago to roughly $95 million now. Tripling? That can't be right.
It mostly isn't. The chart at the top of the page breaks the spending into separate lines, and once you do that the story is clear. The big swings are construction — the bond programs voters approved (Measures T and S). That line spikes when we're building and drops when we're not; it's not ongoing operating cost. A second chunk is charter pass-through: state money that flows through us to the in-district charter schools, which isn't really the district's own spending. Pension and benefits, which are mandated, stay roughly flat. What's left — the actual discretionary operating spending — grew gently, not dramatically, and a lot of even that increase is special-education services, which are a real and largely required cost.
So the honest answer is: our baseline operating spend has grown about in line with what you'd expect, and the headline jumps are construction and pass-through, not the district quietly doubling its overhead. Hover any year on the chart to see the full breakdown.
What you can do with it
Search any of the roughly 5,000 payees. Each shows a total, a year-by-year sparkline, and a rough category — construction, special-education services, utilities, food service, technology, and so on. Click a category to see who's in it, or just scroll the biggest payees. The underlying data is published openly, too, for anyone who wants to do their own analysis.
What it doesn't do well (yet)
I'd rather tell you the limits than have you find them. The categories are a rough, keyword-based grouping to help you scan — not an accounting classification, and I've already had to correct a bunch by hand. A handful of contractors are paid under a person's name, which makes them look like employee reimbursements until we tag them. And while the board's records go back to 2011, the 2011–2013 registers are scanned images our tools can't read cleanly yet, so the page starts at the 2014–15 fiscal year. We kept those older PDFs and will come back to them.
If you spot something that looks wrong — a miscategorized vendor, a name that should be merged, a number that seems off — tell me. A lot of what's already correct here came from exactly that.
Why bother
A school district spends public money, and the public should be able to see how — without filing a request or knowing which PDF to open. The records were always public. This just makes them legible. Take a look: rcsd.info/vendors.