ISD brick wall

Wolcott: Just How Much is Transparency Worth to Our Nation's Schools? Plenty

Peyton Wolcott, Local ContributorPublished: 01-15-09

Life can be pretty amazing if we let it.

A bunch of us — parents and taxpayers — had for several years filed public records requests in our school districts to learn more about their financial operations. With so much industry now offshore, in most counties in America public schools are the largest single budget and employer.

After a while we began running into a series of brick walls. For me, it was detainment in August 2006 by three armed school district police officers whose superintendent hadn't liked me taking pictures of misleading signage on his front door and main lobby wall.

The great thing about metaphorical brick walls is that they can have hidden doors. The trick is to find them.
For me, the hidden door was to start compiling a national roster of school districts posting their check registers online as a means of giving form, energy and substance to the barest beginnings of a grass-roots movement promoting transparency.

As a practical matter, back then, I couldn't get anyone else interested in online public school check registers.
Though there had been encouraging beginnings at the state level with Gov. Rick Perry's executive order calling for schools to spend at least 65 percent of their dollars in the classroom, it's still not the law. In addition, that the formula had been diluted such that an option for those failing to meet the mark — posting their check registers online — was not likely to be utilized by many. As of this week, only six have applied to the Texas Education Agency for their three Schools FIRST points.

Local superintendents, who privately supported my efforts, made it clear that that they viewed receiving public records requests as something akin to being attacked with a stick. Part of it was a fear of the unknown, that villagers would attack the administration building in the dead of night with pitchforks and lanterns.
The online check register movement, being completely voluntary, gave them an opportunity to do the right thing. You could say the carrot won over the stick.

To those first 30 Texas superintendents, and to Commissioner Robert Scott for putting TEA's [Texas Education Agency] checks online, I will always be grateful. Their willingness to venture into unknown territory has jumpstarted the nation's public school transparency movement.

In our tanking economy, with constant news about deficits and fraud in our schools, for them to remain strong, free and locally governed, they're going to have to streamline, and this starts a real dialogue.
Texas has 302 school districts (of 1,031) voluntarily posting check registers online, with a national total of 422 in 28 states, and more than $50 billion in annual transparency.

Pretty amazing, huh?

Wolcott, who lives in Horseshoe Bay, has compiled a comprehensive public school check register roster at http://peytonwolcott.com/.