A recurring theme in community arguments about the 2018 bond: one side says everything is in the board documents; the other says the district buried the numbers voters were shown. Both are partly right, and the district's own commissioned evaluation documents exactly how. There is not one Flipbook. There are two.
The Flipbook voters saw. The 2018 Flipbook was, in the evaluation's words, "the primary communication tool to convey the approximate scope and budget of the Bond Program to voters" — a page per school, with that school's projects, budget, and schedule. It listed 159 projects totaling $604,982,377.
What happened after the election, per the district's own evaluation (Observation 5):
- A district-sponsored review by the district's own former CFO — the "2018 Bond Report," requested by the Board and received by the citizens' advisory committee in January 2021 — found the 2018 Flipbook "contained errors and incorrect estimates," was "a separately created document, not linked to actual planning schedules," and that the original program budget had grown $70 million by September 30, 2020.
- The Flipbook "was subsequently updated at some point in 2019, after the bond had been approved by voters. No documentation of when this error was discovered or communication of the Flipbook update was available on the District website or provided to the Moss Adams team."
- And the report that found the errors? It "does not appear to have been presented to the Board of Education."
The revised Flipbook. The April 2021 edition lists 160 projects totaling $631,713,230 — $26.7 million (4.4%) above the voters' edition. The evaluation checked whether scope changes explained the increase: they explain about $9.2 million of it. The majority, $16.3 million, sits on the 101 projects whose scope did not change at all.
Which baseline does the public see today? The "planned budget" on the district's Jeffco Builds map is the revised baseline, not the voters' one. In our school-by-school join (data), the map's planned budget matches the April-2021 Flipbook on 134 of 141 matchable sites — and sits at almost exactly 1.05× the 2018 figure (the median ratio is 1.050, with 108 of 138 sites within half a percent of it). Anyone comparing the map to the document voters saw will find nearly every school's "planned" number is about 5% higher than the one on their 2018 ballot-season page. That across-the-board uplift is why "the published budgets don't match the Flipbook" keeps coming up in local threads — on the mechanics, the record supports it.
The documents never reconciled in the first place. The evaluation compared every foundational document (Observation 4): the 2016 Master Plan identified $298.7 million in needs; the internal cash-flow workbook summed to $649.1 million (and was last updated after the vote, so what it originally said cannot be verified); the April 2018 Capital Improvement Program presentation said $588.2 million; the August 2018 board presentation said $647 million; the Flipbook said $605.0 million. "The total budgets…do not reconcile to one another."
The projects in neither Flipbook. The district's system carried 13 projects totaling $22.5 million that appear in neither edition — among them the North Area Transportation Center ($7.6M), Trailblazer Stadium ($4.3M), and two outdoor-lab schools (the evaluation's own observation line says "14 projects"; its detail table lists 13). The district later published several of them, with board-approval dates, in its fall-2022 booklet's "Added Projects" list — disclosure that arrived years after the money moved.
Where the original is now. We could not locate the original 2018 Flipbook on the district's current websites. Its complete per-school budgets survive inside the district-hosted evaluation's appendices, which is where our copies come from: appendix-c.csv (2018 vs. 2021, school by school) and appendix-d.csv (Flipbooks vs. the district's internal system budgets).
What this record does and doesn't show. It shows the baseline voters were given was revised upward after the election, quietly, with the revision itself acknowledged only in an internal report that never reached the Board. It does not establish anyone's intent, and "to hide the overruns" is an inference, not a documented fact. The evaluation's own recommendation is the fair summary: reporting to voters "should be updated to accurately provide details on all projects as well as changes to project budget and scope from original expectations communicated to the voters."