The Open Books Public Education Financial Transparency Portal, a result of Senate Bill 96, provides access to school and district financial information from across New Mexico’s public schools.
As mandated by Senate Bill 96, the website provides information on:
- Local, state, federal funding and budgeting, including to support at-risk students, bilingual services, and special education services.
- Actual expenditures for schools and Local Education Agencies (LEAs), including salary and benefits, program expenditures, administrative costs, and other expenditures.
Senate Bill 96
Introduced by Senator Jacob Candelaria, Representative Rebecca Dow, Senator Sander Rue, and PED leadership, Senate Bill 96 appropriated $3 million to launch the financial reporting website by December 31, 2021.
The Project
From January-June 2021, the PED project team completed the following:
- Gathered requirements information from focus groups, including PED employees, members of the public, district financial staff members, and legislative staff
- Contracted with vendors to modify the PED financial database, to build a platform that gathers and formats data for the website, and to build and post the website
- Recruited Pilot Districts (Bloomfield, Eunice, Portales, Montessori of the Rio Grande Charter School, APS) to provide school and special program data for FY2022
From July-December 2021, the PED project team completed the following:
- Modified the PED financial database to allow school and special program information to be gathered and formatted for the website
- Developed a data analytics platform to allow PED to more readily analyze financial information and to create data packages for the website
- Created, tested, and deployed the new Public Education Financial Transparency Portal website
- The new website currently displays:
- District-level funding and expenditure data (not including special programs) for all New Mexico school districts and charter schools
- School-level funding and expenditure data (including special programs) from pilot districts
Later in 2022, the website will display district and school-level data and special program data from all New Mexico districts and charter schools.
Current Project Status—June 2021
Project status is green: it is on schedule and on budget.
- Requirements have been gathered and approved
- Vendor has begun modifications of Statewide Financial Database
- Website model has been developed
- Procurement for data analytics platform and website development vendor almost complete
Need more info? Visit the Open Books Public Education Financial Transparency Portal.