Make following the money easier
Point of view: More transparency needed

BY BRIAN DOWNS Comments 0
Published: November 2, 2009

Oklahoma’s public schools spend more than $4 billion in federal, state and local tax dollars every year, but the accounting of this spending does not appear to be as transparent as it should be. Yes, every district has to have an independent audit every year; but as a recent Oklahoman article pointed out, not every school board member knows what to do with those audits.

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School board members have to attend training seminars on topics such as school finance and education laws, but perhaps not enough information is being given about transparency and accountability. As elected officials, school board members need to be the voice of taxpayers when it comes to local control of education.

There are only 31 auditing firms approved by the state Department of Education to perform the more than 530 annual audits and they are not as in-depth as the state auditor’s office would do. After all, the former superintendent of the Marble City School District was apparently able to embezzle money for nine years by cooking the books despite having the district’s finances audited each of those years.

A new law authored by Rep. Ann Coody, R-Lawton, will help by allowing the state auditor to conduct random audits of school districts with fewer than 1,000 students. It’s a good start, but since it permits a maximum of four per year and then only if funding is available, it would take at least a century to audit every such district.

Now is the time to start improving the education auditing system. Hundreds of millions of federal stimulus dollars are going directly to schools and that money will be reported with a level of transparency that exceeds that of the more than $2 billion in state tax dollars that goes to common education.

When Oklahomans for Responsible Government conducted its first Blueprint for Transparency to look at school district Web sites, only six of the more than 530 school districts had the audit results posted online. Only 12 districts had complete budget information posted. These documents are most likely already in a digital format: a document file, spreadsheet or scanned image, so it shouldn’t be difficult to upload them to the district’s Web site. Since 85 percent of districts already have sites, the vast majority of districts can and should be providing this information online already.

Next November, voters will decide on State Question 744 which, according to a recent interim study on the issue in the Oklahoma House of Representatives, would take $850 million away from every state agency and give it directly to schools. How can voters decide to take away money from other vital agencies without knowing for sure how current dollars are being spent?

Downs is executive director of Oklahomans for Responsible Government.