Posts tagged School Finance

A few days after my post on May 1st, I received the following email from a parent in northeastern Pennsylvania. While I have received dozens of communications like this previously, this particular email offered a true sense of self validation in helping to make a real difference…even beyond the landscape of Northwestern Lehigh School District.

Mr. Fisher,

I happened upon your website www.prideandpromise.com and really would like to commend you on a well organized site that addresses issues so pertinent to all residents, students, and taxpayers in PA. I would truly appreciate and enjoy the opportunity to speak with you about the site and also about the issues you cover.

I reside in Northeastern PA and have been active as a taxpayer and parent in my school district’s discussions about finances and education. I am in the process of working with a group of other residents interested in more transparency and fiscal responsibilty within our district, given the current economic climate. After seeing the resources you have made available to residents in your area, I would love to see that type of resource available to our residents. Unfortunately, right now the school website is lacking and school board meeting agendas, notes, and budget proposals are not available unless you physically go to the school to review the information there.

I have seen other districts in PA such as Pennsbury and your site that disclose so much more information that I really feel like our area is behind and citizens are left in the dark. One other area I really took away from some of your posts is the actions that your school board is taking to address the PSERS crisis (specifically the letter to legislatures that your district sent asking for guidance and assistance with the upcoming pension increases). I feel like our board is not doing a lot if anything to address the dire circumstances the rates will create. (Unless of course, it is happening behind the scenes, although I doubt it, considering many of our school board directors have family employed as teachers in the district.

Well, now that I’ve given you a brief overview of my interests, I do hope that we can get in contact. And again, my congrats to you on a great website and the proactive discussions you advocate and approach.

Sincerely,
MH

[Note: I have purposefully removed the author's name and contact information]

As you can probably guess – I was very eager to take advantage of this great opportunity to learn more on public input and perception. Our conversation lasted nearly two hours. During our dialog, it was clearly evident that some of my reasons for wanting to serve as a school board member were quickly reinforced.

Active and engaged stakeholders are a very important asset to any organization. Parents, students, teachers and community members NEED timely and concise information to issues that affect them and their school districts. Collectively, they WANT proactive communication…and they MUST “feel” engaged and a collaborative part of the process.

To start – transparency must become MORE than just a convenient buzz word for today. This initiative must be the foundation of district-wide commitments to developing policies and procedures to help open the doors to promote greater understanding and advocacy.

In building these strong alliances, technology-enabled stakeholders REQUIRE a new level of information access that has historically not been a part of the culture in public education. Now more than ever, technology infrastructure must be fully leveraged to create a searchable archive of information and applicable data. And any notion of our public’s perception to existing dead-ends and narrow, one-way streets filled with roadblocks must be completely eliminated.

We must continue to diligently transform any outdated ideologies into the necessary attitudes of customer service and fiscal responsibility to all our shareholders.

Here are a few suggestions from Benjamin DeGrow, Education Policy Analyst at the Education Policy Center in Golden, Colorado:

1. Easy to find. Users should be able to find a link to the database of expenditures directly from the local education provider’s website.
2. Detailed. Each expenditure should be attached to a unique record that at minimum includes: The transaction amount;  the transaction date;  the recipient’s name and address (if employee payroll is included, workplace addresses should be used to provide reasonable privacy), to ensure clear identification;   the name of the budget fund;  the budget fund’s associated revenue sources, to help determine whether an expenditure was funded by local and state taxes, federal grants, private grants, or user fees;  and the purpose of the expenditure, so local education providers can explain once and avoid misunderstandings.
3. Free to use. An “open” format ensures the user can access all available expenditure data without having to purchase additional software. To meet this criterion school agencies can export files into a free XML or CSV format, and upload the files to the online database for citizens to access.
4. Searchable. A structured format ensures the user can find and sort expenditure data by relevant category details. Searchability is a highly important feature that distinguishes a user friendly online database from a descriptive PDF uploaded and posted online.
5. Regularly updated. Since school districts and other education providers typically prepare financial reports for monthly board review, an update of expenditure data each month is entirely reasonable.
6. Available notifications. Local education providers easily can create RSS feeds or similar mechanisms to which users may subscribe for automated notifications of data updates.
7. Archived data. Expanding information technology capabilities will continue to enable low cost data storage. Expenditure data should not disappear, but should be kept in place permanently.

It’s time to unlock the vault.