Vestavia Hills School District, Alabama
A Midsized School District Rebuilds Public Trust with Transparency and Budget Alignment

Primary Objective

Aligning Dollars With Values

Modern school districts face a critical challenge: how to plan, create and communicate budgets that align with their strategic goals and energize their stakeholders. Vestavia Hills School District embraced this challenge. After a failed tax vote in 2023, the district recognized the urgent need for greater transparency in how funds were allocated and spent. “We had a failed tax vote in 2023. The community didn’t understand how we were spending our dollars and why existing funds didn’t cover the necessary projects. It highlighted the need for more transparency in the budgeting process.” The objective became clear: modernize the budgeting process to connect every dollar spent to the district’s mission and values, and make the story understandable by the community.

Background

A Suburban District Serving 7,000 Students Across Nine Schools

Vestavia Hills School District serves nearly 7,000 students across nine schools in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, with an annual budget of about $120 million. The district’s Chief School Financial Officer, Courtney Brown, with 20 years in public accounting before joining the district, brought a deep understanding of auditing, school boards and financial operations to the role. The context: a district that already excelled in strategic planning and recognised the need to modernise its financial story and stakeholder communications.

Challenge

Legacy Spreadsheets and Low Transparency

Historically the budgeting process at Vestavia Hills was highly manual: spreadsheets, static communications, multiple departmental exchanges of Excel files and little visibility for the public. Courtney described the past process: “In that process, as you can imagine, we were swapping emails and Excel spreadsheets and having a lot of face-to-face meetings.” The failed tax referendum exposed a deeper issue: stakeholders did not fully understand how budget dollars supported the district’s goals—and thus were less likely to approve additional funding. The need for transparency and accessibility in budgeting became non-negotiable.

Solution

Deploying ClearGov’s Digital Budget Book and Transparency Platform

To address these issues, Vestavia Hills implemented ClearGov Digital Budget Book and its Transparency module. This allowed the district to shift from spreadsheets to a modern, interactive budgeting system. “This year was our first year to publish our budget book using ClearGov’s Digital Budget Book and Transparency,” explained Brown.

Key capabilities included:

• Attaching quotes and invoices directly so departments could explain what they were spending. 
• Matching requests to fund sources, enhancing accountability.
• A five- to ten-year capital improvement planning module instead of single-year snapshots.  All of which helped tie budgeting directly to strategic goals (like investing in educators, STEM programs, leadership support) and present that to stakeholders in a more engaging format.

You can type in a vendor name and pull it up … it shows that we’re not trying to hide anything.

Implementation

From Spreadsheet Chaos to Department-Driven Collaboration

Implementation involved engaging departments and migrating data to ClearGov’s platform. Courtney described the process:

“I love the fact that … we can build out our projects over five years, 10 years, however long we need,” says Brown.

Additionally, they redesigned their website to put their budget front and centre, used custom banners, and made the budget book easily accessible. This required coordination across departments, training, and a shift from static PDFs to dynamic content — but staff embraced the change and the time invested in migration paid off in engagement and clarity.

ClearGov made it easier to exchange information. Departments can attach quotes and invoices in the system and give a lot of details about what they’re actually spending their budget dollars on, which really helps to eliminate questions.

Results

Greater Efficiency, Engagement and Stakeholder Trust

With the new system in place, Vestavia Hills experienced significant benefits:

• Budgeting became more closely aligned with strategic goals – e.g., “Our FY25 budget prioritizes investments in employing elite educators and staff … We gave raises above the state-mandated 2 % to our teachers,” states Brown.
• Collaboration improved: departmental ownership increased, stakeholder questions decreased.
• Communication became proactive and accessible: all budget hearings were on YouTube; narrative descriptions and historical information were available for each fund. 
• Transparency soared: with ClearGov’s “Open Checkbook” feature, citizens could search vendor names, revenue and expenditures transparently.

“I’ve had several people in the community tell me that they had questions, but after I presented the budget, I got feedback that they found the answers to their questions in ClearGov,” says Brown.

Overall, the district transformed their budgeting process from an annual task into an ongoing dialogue with the community—improving trust, clarity and financial stewardship.

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