a : free from pretense or deceit : frank
One of the things that I believe in is transparency. When I talk about transparency, I am talking about 2 things-fiscal transparency (how are my tax dollars and your tax dollars being spent) and the way in which the public is informed about our schools and decisions being made regarding them. I think our district does a good job with transparency, but I think there are some improvements that could be made, particularly with the school board.
Let's address the fiscal transparency first. I am a total nerd and love being able to scroll through the hundreds of pages of financial documents that are available each month with the school board documents. But in that, there is a bit of a problem. There are hundreds of pages of financial documents each month. These documents are often posted the Thursday or Friday before school board meetings on the following Tuesday and I wonder if school board members have enough time to review hundreds of pages of documents. Some of those pages are easy to scroll through-Kelly Services is the company we use for substitute teachers, so those pages are easy to say are legitimate and justified. And there are lots of charges for things like pizza and fruits and veggies-vendors we use for school lunches. There are also lots of checks for things like utilities. All of those make sense. It is the ones that are a little tough that I question. I should probably forewarn you that I am cheap. I like a good deal and am pretty conservative when it comes to money. My husband's car is 15 years old and my minivan is 10. And I wonder if we as a school district are always getting a good deal. When we are dealing with a half a billion (yes, that is billion with a b) dollars annually to run ASD, it makes me wonder if we are always looking to pinch pennies. I have been impressed with Rob Smith-he is the business administrator and does a great job. But I don't think he has the time to look at every expense and know if we are getting the biggest bang for our buck.
Here are a few of the items that caught my eye recently:
Foaming hand soap 17,018.88
LEHI CITY CORP/POLICE SALARY REIMB 34,000.00 34,000.00
If someone can explain to me why we are incurring those expenses, I am reasonable and can comprehend that. Maybe it just costs $17,000 for foaming hand soap for 73,000 students. I believe that the police department and school district split the salaries of police/resource officers in the high schools (which I am guessing is the above check to Lehi police). OK, I get that. My concern is that I am not sure we are questioning expenses at all. Also, the way the annual budget is created is difficult to interpret-money drives programs, but when large amounts of money are put in general accounts, it is difficult to examine how much we are investing and in what.
I would love to see a review panel of a few parent volunteers each month go through those expenses-a set of fresh eyes to see if there are ways in which we can save money. Do you have other ideas in which we can increase fiscal transparency?
The second aspect of transparency is getting the facts in an "easily detected" way. At a recent board meeting, Dr. Henshaw talked about some concerns with enrollment numbers in high school, particularly a drop off in students from the October enrollment numbers to the April enrollment numbers in 3 high schools. There was talk about working with the schools to see if this was due to kids moving out or if there was an issue with kids dropping out. Dr. Henshaw stated that these statistics could effect our graduation rates and that the important thing was that behind every number there was a student. Agreed. Here is where I have the issue-there was talk about "those three schools" and "that one school", but I felt the board was talking about an issue while withholding information from the public and those attending the meeting. I went home and looked through the notes. You can click on the link below to look for yourself-it is one page 410.
http://board.alpineschools.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Meeting-Documents.pdf
I find it hard to feel like discussions are "readily understood" when the board fails to articulate what schools are being discussed. And to clear things up, here are the numbers. Lehi High School lost 129 students from October 1st to April 30th, American Fork High lost 88 and Westlake lost 65. Those students could have moved out of the district, gone to charter schools, etc. My frustration is that the superintendent and board members were unwilling to just state the names and numbers.
I recently was interested in comparing a couple of high schools in the district. I first got on the ASD website and then the individual school websites to see if I was able to compare. I scoured Stakeholder's Reports and had little success. I ended up calling the schools directly who were unable to give me information like that percentage of students passing the AP test and the average ACT score as well as the percentage of students accessing remediation packets to make up lost credits. I had to call the district and the numbers were significantly different. If the district believes in transparency, I think that school info should be posted on the website so that parents can do a side by side comparison of schools. Do you have thoughts about how we can make information about schools more readily available to parents?
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