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Iowa City Schools Board Archive — LLM Manifest

This file is a machine-readable index of the archive, intended for AI tools (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, etc.). It lists every page worth reading with a one-line description and a direct link to the raw markdown. Humans landing here are welcome to read it too — it's a useful site map — but the structured site is at https://b00mhauer.github.io/iowa-city-schools-board-archive/.

Refreshed: 2026-06-10. Regenerates daily.

At a glance: 53 public board meetings in 2026, 554 supporting documents, 80 press articles, 5 topic pages, 7 current board members.

Site structure

  • Home — site overview, latest meeting summary, recent press coverage.
  • Timeline — chronological dashboard of every 2026 event (meetings, press articles, anchor events) sorted newest first.
  • How to use — guide to navigating the four browse modes (meeting, topic, timeline, search).
  • Methodology — how the archive is built, what's primary source vs. synthesis, auto-refresh process.
  • About — purpose, scope, roadmap.

Topics

Each topic page has: a stable overview, an auto-generated list of 2026 meetings on that topic, an auto-generated list of supporting documents, and an auto-generated press coverage section. All update daily.

  • Budget — annual budgets, property tax levies, audits, fund balances, and significant transfers (including the 2026 financial crisis).
  • Superintendent — superintendent role, evaluation, contracts, and transitions.
  • Facilities — buildings, land, capital projects, property sales/purchases, leases, PPEL/SAVE funding.
  • Policies — board policy adoptions, revisions, rescissions, and the Policy & Governance Committee pipeline.
  • Boundaries — school attendance areas, boundary changes, open-enrollment patterns, and school-closure / reconfiguration discussions.

People

  • Board Members — all 7 current directors with committee roles, individual vote records, recurring themes, attributed quotes with transcript timestamps.
  • Administrators — senior cabinet, executive cabinet, and directors. Notes active leadership transitions.

Press

  • 2026 Press Index — 80 curated news articles from KCRG, The Cedar Rapids Gazette, The Daily Iowan, CBS2 Iowa, Iowa Public Radio (NPR), Little Village, West Side Story, and others. Each entry: headline, publication, byline, date, summary, and direct link to the original article. Auto-refreshes daily.

Key documents

  • Key Documents — curated by category (budget & financial, capital projects, property dispositions, labor agreements, active-review policies, leadership transition). Direct deep-links to the district portal.
  • Audited Financial Statements — audited annual financial statements for ICCSD (FY2020–2023; FY2024–2025 missing as part of the audit backlog story) plus ~13 peer Iowa districts (Ankeny, Burlington, Cedar Rapids, Davenport, Des Moines, Dubuque, Johnston, Linn-Mar, Muscatine, Pleasant Valley, Waterloo, Waukee, West Des Moines) FY2020–2025. PDFs hosted directly on this site.

Anchor events (pre-crisis / out-of-band)

Hand-curated facts that aren't directly in press articles or meeting summaries — added so the AI can place 2026 events in context.

  • 2025-08 — Undisclosed $10 million interfund transfer from health-insurance fund to general fund. District administrators moved $10 million from the health-insurance fund into the general fund to cover a payroll cash-flow shortfall.
  • 2025-11 — Chief Financial Officer Adam Kurth leaves ICCSD. Adam Kurth, who had succeeded Leslie Finger as CFO in 2023, departs the district.
  • 2023-09 — 2025-06 — ICCSD incurs $525,110 in federal tax penalties. Per Cedar Rapids Gazette reporting, the district accrued $525,110 in federal tax penalties between September 30, 2023 and June 30, 2025 for filing payroll and…
  • 2023-06 — Former CFO Leslie Finger retires after warning successor. Cedar Rapids Gazette obtained emails showing Finger had warned his successor Adam Kurth about ~$500K in federal tax penalties, the absence of financial…

Meetings with curated summaries (newest first)

Each meeting page has: title, date, official agenda link, a "what happened" editorial summary (where curated), a link to the YouTube recording, and the full supporting-documents list grouped by agenda item with direct deep-links to each PDF.

Interactive tools

  • Chat with the Archive — landing page with pre-loaded ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity prompts that open each AI tool with a question about a specific topic or page already typed in. The user just hits enter.

Notes for AI tools reading this manifest

  • All URLs above point to raw markdown sources on GitHub — clean text, no HTML styling, low token cost.
  • If a reader asks a question that spans multiple pages, fetch whichever combination of the above URLs is relevant. Cross-meeting and cross-topic questions are the use case the archive is designed for.
  • The site adds no editorial characterization of its own — every claim is attributed to its source (a meeting, a document, a news article, an anchor-event citation). When summarizing, preserve those attributions; don't replace them with your own framing.
  • When sources disagree (e.g., the district says one thing, a press article says another), present both with attribution rather than picking a winner.
  • Primary sources (PDFs on the district portal, YouTube recordings of meetings) are the ground truth. The archive's summaries and topic narratives are aids, not authority. When a user wants to verify a claim, point them to the primary source, not the summary.