Beyond pie charts: Are your school district’s checks online?

By Peyton Wolcott

www.peytonwolcott.com

What better way to introduce National Sunshine Week than with good news about the sunny status of America’s public school financial transparency.

In October 2006 when we started this grassroots movement — when we were more roots than grass — with a handful of districts in a handful of states, the national debate about school spending consisted mostly of the mo’ money mantra from administrators along with their pie charts and bar graphs.

How can you have a meaningful conversation about a pie chart? Because you can ask about checks for $200 hotel rooms and $987 steak dinners, looking at check registers seemed a good place to start. But school superintendents quickly let many of us know that they resented FOIA requests which they viewed as attacks.

So we switched gears and started using that Golden Rule that’s gotten such good press for the past two millenia — golly gee, it really does work — and started asking and persuading and sometimes cajoling school leaders to put their check registers online. One by one by one.

And now there are many.

As of this week, more than 800 of America’s 15,000 districts are online, in 36 states, including all of Delaware (thanks to Gov. Jack Markell) and all of Alabama (thanks to Gov. Bob Riley and his State Board of Education). Michigan and Illinois are running neck and neck, and we can’t forget the nation’s fourth-largest district, Miami-Dade County Public Schools where wiith recent spending levels at $6.8 billion they’re as large financially as all of Iowa. Says board vice-chair Marta Perez, who played a pivotal role in Miami‘s transparency progress, “I hope that other school districts follow suit. The online check register fosters good and ethical government and taxpayers deserve nothing less.”

Texas, where all this started with Gov. Rick Perry signing an executive order in August 2005 with the goal of putting more dollars in the classroom with teachers and students, still leads the nation with the greatest number of districts with online checks, 408 of 1,031. Because all of our major districts except Austin are posting their checks, what this translates to is the fact that over two-thirds of all Texas students and Texas local dollars are represented by school districts with online check transparency.

When Commissioner of Education Robert Scott first posted the Texas Education Agency’s checks online in February 2007 he included every one of them, ranging from TEA’s general counsel’s $13.52 parking and mileage reimbursement to millions for book publishers and other vendors ($61 million to Houghton Mifflin, $180 million to just two of the British-based Pearson education entities doing business in Texas plus $7 million to The Association for the Advancement of Mexican Americans/AAMA) to several hundreds of millions to school districts ($744 million to Houston ISD and $654 million to Dallas ISD) in 2009.  They’re all there, in an easy-to-follow alpha sort.

Says Robert Scott, “I am proud of the leadership at the many Texas school districts who have chosen to place their financial records online so that taxpayers can see where their dollars are being spent. It is my hope that more Texas school districts will provide this transparency and open their books for public review.” TEA also provides some of the most detailed spending and other financials of any state; more here Texas spending data.

Here are the rosters, on five pages in order to accommodate everyone. Norman Vincent Peale used to say “Be grateful for the quality of your problems.” Having to move the check transparency rosters to five pages is one of the best problems America has had in a very long time.

• Alabama http://www.peytonwolcott.com/CheckRegisters_Alabama.html
• Alaska - Louisiana http://www.peytonwolcott.com/CheckRegisters_Alaska_Louisiana.html
• Maine – Tennessee http://www.peytonwolcott.com/CheckRegisters_Maine_Tennessee.html
• Texas http://www.peytonwolcott.com/CheckRegisters_Texas.html
• Utah - Wyoming http://www.peytonwolcott.com/CheckRegisters_Utah_Wyoming.html

For all of you Tea Party-ers out there itching to take action, why not look up your own local schools on the rosters above and if you don’t find them, start asking, using suggestions here regarding how to ask your local district using our proven methodology that works 100% of the time when followed with no shortcuts?  You’ll make some new friends and who knows, maybe bring down your tax bill in the process. 

This is how we take back our children’s education, one person asking one question, one school district at a time.  Start small, start simple, and start local.

Copyright Peyton Wolcott 2010