JCBOE Contract Transparency Monitor

Jersey City Board of Education

Tracking whether the public can actually see the contracts their Board of Education approves. Governance that remembers.

What is this? When the Board votes to spend taxpayer money on a contract, residents should be able to see the full agreement — what work is being done, how much it costs, and who signed off. This dashboard tracks how often that information is actually provided to the public through BoardDocs, the Board's official document portal. Full Report

Contract: A legal agreement between the school district and a company. Should include what work is being done, how much it costs, how long it lasts, and signatures from both parties.
Resolution: A formal vote by the Board. When you see "Resolution 8.07," that's the Board voting to approve something like spending money on a contract. The resolution text is the paragraph on the agenda.
PO Form (Purchase Order): An internal form the district uses to authorize a payment. This is NOT a contract — it's the district telling itself "ok, spend this money." It doesn't show what the vendor agreed to do.
Source Document: The actual contract or proposal that spells out exactly what a company will do, for how much, and under what conditions. This is what should be public but usually isn't.
Documentation Gap: When the Board approves spending but doesn't attach the actual agreement. You can see "we approved $2M for Company X" but can't see what Company X actually agreed to do.
Amendment / Change Order: A change to an existing contract, usually to spend more money or extend the timeline. Both the amendment and the original contract should be publicly available.
NTE (Not To Exceed): The maximum amount that can be spent under a contract. The actual cost may be less, but can't go higher without another Board vote.
OPRA: Open Public Records Act — New Jersey law that gives you the right to request public records from government agencies. If a document isn't on BoardDocs, you can file an OPRA request to get it.
BoardDocs: The website (go.boarddocs.com) the JCBOE uses to publish meeting agendas and attachments. This is the main place residents can see what the Board is voting on.
Bid Tabulation: A spreadsheet that compares the bids submitted by different companies competing for a contract. It shows who bid, how much they bid, and who won. It's useful for transparency but is not the actual contract — it just shows who was selected.
Vendor: A company or person that provides goods or services to the school district.
Renewal: When an existing contract is extended for another year. NJ law allows renewals without re-bidding, but the terms should still be publicly documented.
Capital Reserve Withdrawal: A Board vote to move money out of the district's capital reserve fund to pay for specific capital projects (building repairs, equipment, construction). The withdrawal resolution names the contractors receiving the money but is not itself a contract — the underlying contracts should exist separately, with their own documentation.
Cooperative Purchasing: Buying through a state or regional master contract instead of running a local bid. New Jersey law lets school districts piggyback on statewide contracts (NJ State Contract, Omnia, ESCNJ) that were already competitively bid at the state level. The contract exists, but it lives at the state level, not the district level.
Jointure Agreement: An inter-district agreement where one school district contracts with another (or with a county educational services commission) to share transportation, tuition, or other services. Common in New Jersey special education where students attend out-of-district programs.
Rescission: A Board vote that cancels or reverses a prior approval. If the Board approved a contract and then the district decides not to move forward, a rescission resolution unwinds the earlier commitment.
Raw Gap vs Genuine Undocumented: Two different ways of measuring the documentation gap. Raw Gap counts every Board action where zero documents were attached on BoardDocs. Genuine Undocumented is a stricter figure that filters out items that are not really new undocumented vendor spending — rescissions, grant applications, policy thresholds, and amendments whose parent contract is documented and whose chain cumulative increments stay within the parent's not-to-exceed ceiling.
Chain Within Parent NTE: When a parent contract has a not-to-exceed ceiling and its amendments add up to less than that ceiling, the amendments are "absorbed" within the parent's already-approved authorization. They still count as governance events (each amendment is a separate undocumented Board action) but they do not add to the total dollar gap, because the money is already counted through the parent contract.

25 actual signed contracts are attached across only 15 of 484 unique Board commitments (3.1%), covering $39.2M (7.6%) of $514.9M in approved spending. The count of 25 is higher than 15 because some items have multiple signed contracts attached (e.g. the 2024/25 Preschool Program Contract has separate agreements for Academy House Child Development Center and for the Head Start grantee Greater Bergen Community Action). The Raw Gap of 81 items / $81.7M counts every Board action with zero attachments; the Genuine Undocumented figure of 68 items / $77.6M is stricter, filtering out 1 rescission, 1 grant application, 1 policy threshold, and 10 amendments whose chain stays within a documented parent's not-to-exceed ceiling. Terms like Raw Gap vs Genuine Undocumented, Chain Within Parent NTE, Rescission, and PO Form are defined in the glossary above.

Meeting Timeline

Each box is one Board meeting. Green = documented, Red = no docs. Yellow badge = Special Meeting, Blue badge = Reorganization.

Gap Rate Over Time

Percentage of contracts missing documentation at each meeting

Gap Rate by Contract Size

Larger contracts aren't necessarily better documented

What's Actually Attached?

When the Board does attach a file, what kind of document is it?

Largest Undocumented Contracts

Date	Vendor	Amount	Description

Total Dollar Exposure

How much money was approved without the public seeing the actual contract?

Vendor Documentation Tracker

Companies that have received contracts without full documentation. Red border = has gaps.

Renewals & Amendments