About this project

The LBUSD Timeline is a source-cited public record of governance at Laguna Beach Unified School District — 112 events, 256 sources, and 468 citations spanning the budget, the board, the superintendents, and the disputes between them. Every figure on the site links back to a primary source, so you can follow the story without taking anyone's word for it.

Why it exists

Local school governance moves quickly, and the record of it is scattered: meeting agendas live in one portal, closed-session report-outs in another, public-records responses arrive as loose PDFs, and the framing comes from competing advocacy newsletters that each tell a different story. There was no single place to see what actually happened, in order, with receipts. This site assembles those fragments into one neutral, chronological, verifiable timeline — so a parent, a journalist, or a resident can get oriented in minutes and check the sources themselves.

Who runs it

Built and maintained by Andrew Lombardi, a Laguna Beach parent, through his software studio Mystic Coders. It's an independent project — not affiliated with the district, the board, any trustee, or any advocacy group, and not funded by them. The editorial goal is the record itself, not a side.

How it's made

Board-meeting recordings are transcribed using local AI speech-to-text, and AI helps draft meeting summaries and cross-link the people, organizations, events, and sources that recur across the record. That's where AI's role ends. It never decides what is true: every published fact is reviewed by a human and tied to a primary source, and every meeting summary is checked by hand against the original recording. The dataset is also open — you can browse the full timeline or query it directly through a public Model Context Protocol endpoint.

How facts get in

What enters the timeline, and how each event is described, is governed by a short set of rules: every event must cite a source, descriptions stay neutral, and opinion lives only in attributed quotes. Read the full editorial standards. If you spot an error or a missing event, tell us and we'll correct it.