Tuesday, Mar. 1, 2011 - Tavares, FL - Today is Tuesday, and after 3 hours at a County Board meeting and my mind turning to fudge after listening to rhetoric about why the taxpayers should spend $9-million on a new Emergency Ops Center (which passed 3-2 - see my next blog posting), I thought I would write about School District transparency...
One method of providing spending transparency is for a government agency to provide a copy of their "checkbook" ( aka check register or payables listing) online. Below, we provide three examples.
Are you listening, Lake County (FL) School District? LCSD refuses to even provide an electronic version of their detailed budget online, much less their checkbook (records of all spending and payments). HERE is the only budget version we Lake County FL taxpayers can get online, which is only 21 pages long and in a "standard" regulatory format not understandable to 95% of taxpayers.
In contrast, here are examples of 4 random School Districts with much better transparency, including the posting of more detailed budgets and checkbook registers online (for 3 of the 4).
A. Wichita, Kansas School District Places Checkbook Register Online
The article describing it is here:
http://www.kwch.com/news/kwch-usd-259-puts-checkbook-online-01072011,0,6329384.story
The actual Wichita School District Page with links to the budget is HERE.
B. St. John's County (FL) School District Places Budget Details AND Check Register Online
Did you know there is a Florida State transparency initiative HERE being implemented, and it started with recommendations for School Districts to enhance transparency by placing more financial details online? The initiating 2009 legislation was the Florida Transparency Act HERE. Here is a quote from that page:
"During the 2010 Session, the Legislature adopted proviso language [pdf] to implement the Committee's recommendations related to school districts. The Department of Education is required to provide access to existing school district financial-related reports on the department's website and to create a working group to develop recommendations to provide school-level data in greater detail and frequency."
Recently, I was looking at the St. John's County (FL) School District website, and on the MAIN webpage there is a link to "Transparency" and when you click it, you get THIS page that lists links to online copies of "MONTHLY Bills Paid year to date" and many other documents. Clicking on the November, 2010 report provides a 169 page pdf computer report listing all payments made to vendors. If you enter "AT&T" into the pdf search box, you can scroll through all payments made to At&T. THAT IS TRANSPARENCY, and allows the public to research payment patterns and questionable vendors, etc. We would prefer an online database where you could enter sort and search criteria to create a custom report, but this pdf format is still a great improvement and MUCH BETTER than anything from the Lake County School District.
They don't post the full budget details, but instead of only posting the Florida State required "budget summary" of about 17 pages (which is all that Lake County provides), they post a 152 page bound budget and annual report (not the CAFR) including graphs, etc. which clearly describes many spending areas. If you click on a budget link, it looks like it is not loading, but it takes awhile to download the large document, so be patient and wait because the document is 44mb.
C. Miami-Dade County (FL) & School District
1) Miami-Dade County - If you go to the Miami-Dade County website, you will find they post a huge, detailed budget book of 578 pages. In contrast, the Lake County school District doesn't post anything larger than the standard, regulatory summary budget that is 21 pages.
http://www.miamidade.gov/budget/FY2010-11/Adopted/volume2/volume2.pdf
2) The Miami-Dade School District is HERE:
http://www.dadeschools.net/ and the School Supt. site is HERE: http://superintendent.dadeschools.net/
The Financial Services dept is HERE for the School District and under reports you can find their 150+ page annual budget books. However, I did not find any check register reports.
D. Texas - Northside Independent School District - San Antonio
The above webpage lists three links to the last three check registers. However, they are NOT year to date, but only individual months. Thus you cannot see all the payments to a vendor to date for the year. I much prefer year to date, listed by vendor and also listed in chronological order by department code, and also by program or project code, thus you can see totals by vendor, and total payments per department or program.
Texas was a leader in posting School Checkbooks Online
Conclusion:
It is time that Lake County School District publishes these reports online:
- Detailed budget reports by at least three priority sort codes, such as program, function (i.e. staff) and department.
- Budget book similar to some examples above. There is no such online publication for Lake County.
- Check register by Cumulative year to date sorted by these categories:
- fiscal year to date sorted by department,
- budget category,
- by program and
- by vendor.
vj
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