This is how you query the data

Copy this. Paste it into Claude, ChatGPT or any assistant that can fetch a web page. Type your question at the end.

or select the text below — 5,394 characters

It carries every address the assistant needs — the whole database, the budget lines, the town ledger, the annual town reports, and 12,202 agendas and sets of minutes across 51 town boards, 2009-01-05 to 2026-11-17 — so it reads the data instead of guessing at it, and cites the document each figure came from. You do not need to know any SQL, and you do not need an account anywhere.

Why the prompt has to include the links

Assistants generally refuse to fetch a URL they have not been given — a sensible rule, since it stops a web page from talking an assistant into visiting somewhere else. The side effect is that an assistant can read this site's front page, correctly describe everything it offers, and still not be allowed to open any of it. A link you paste yourself is authorised by you. That is the whole trick, and it works today with every assistant.

The addresses, as links

The same ones as in the prompt. Follow them directly if you would rather.

Newest reports

In the prompt too, so an assistant sees what went up this week.

  • Carried-over orders2026-10-23
    The general fund carried at most $190,128 of open orders into a new year, and the budget went with them.
  • Special education definition2026-10-23
    Our rules now count what DESE’s documents count; DESE’s FY2024 report still counts $743,667 more.
  • Grants other districts get2026-10-23
    Comparison districts won 19 competitive grants Lunenburg did not in FY2026–FY2027; it won 2.
  • Grant allocations compared2026-10-23
    Lunenburg gets less IDEA per pupil than most comparable districts; Title I tracks its low-income share.
  • Unspent money by fund2026-10-23
    Fees, lunch and the circuit breaker held $1,692,438 at the end of FY2023; by our count, $1,119,636 by FY2026.
  • The whole school budget2026-10-23
    The voted school budget is the general fund. Every fund together spent $29,929,041 in FY2026, $3,641,567 more, and these pages show where it came from and which lines it paid.
  • School money in2026-10-23
    Outside the voted budget, school funds took in $3,407,472 in FY2025, most of it fees, lunch and grants.
  • Paid outside the general fund2026-10-23
    Funds outside the voted budget spent $16,680,612 in four years: 13.4% of school spending in FY2026.
  • Grant spending by line2026-10-23
    Grant spending on a voted budget line went from 5.1% in FY2023 to 2.3% in FY2026.
  • Budget lines, all funds2026-10-23
    In FY2026 other funds spent $4,024,956 beside the general fund; $2,408,319 of it sat on no budget line.
  • Turf field capital plans2026-10-21
    The schools have put the field in every capital plan of theirs since FY2022; its year kept moving.
  • Surplus suggestions2026-10-20
    The surplus came from many small leftovers, year after year, not one line; these options follow from that.

What to ask it

There are 108 questions this archive can answer, in plain English, each one already run against the data — so nothing on the list is a question we merely hope is answerable. Many carry a second line saying what the answer does not tell you, which is usually the more important half.

If your assistant supports MCP

There is a server at lunenburgbudgetproject.org/mcp — add it as a remote MCP server in your client's settings, not in the chat. It gives the assistant eight tools over the same data, each one shaped so the mistakes this archive documents cannot be made: budget history takes one stage at a time, so a growth rate cannot be measured from an actual to a budget.

Every address in the prompt is generated from the same list that produces llms.txt and the index of published addresses, so the three cannot drift apart.

What changed

Version 15 — updated September 20, 2026