It's time to close our wallets until school districts open their books!  Public information belongs to the public and HB 2564 simply provides another financial barrier to documents that should be readily accessible in paper or online. Without access to public information, the public schools will continue to behave as “private schools funded with public money.”  The Texas Public Information Act was created to prevent government bodies like school districts from hiding their activities from the public.  How can we trust public school districts that spend our tax dollars to fund attorneys and lobbyists to battle against our right to access fundamental public information?

Eanes ISD should spend our tax dollars to provide public information in an efficient and effective manner instead of retaining attorneys to hide it.  Texas school districts who share at least one thing in common (their outside law firms) fiercely battle the public’s right to know by retaining outside law firms funded by our education tax dollars to request frivolous OAG opinion rulings.  Some districts delay production of public information in other ways as well including deliberate noncompliance.  I waited over one full year to obtain information requested from the Eanes ISD board members in September 2005. \Although the Office of the Attorney General ruled that the district must produce the public information, I accessed the information only after submitting a formal complaint to County Attorney David Escamilla.  Eanes ISD retained a criminal defense attorney ... using our tax dollars, of course.   Notably, the responsive documents included reports funded by our tax dollars that, to my knowledge, were never released to the public including Facility Assessment Reports from many years that appear to specifically detail American with Disabilities Act (ADA) noncompliance (inaccessibility to our campuses), a 2004 Construction Audit that appears to reflect an egregious lack of fiscal accountability, and a 2005 Safety and Security Report regarding significant concerns across all Eanes ISD campuses.  Imagine, the district retained tax-funded attorneys to fight our right to access these reports.  I have posted the information on my website, www.keepeanesinformed.com.  Further, although I requested to “inspect” the responsive public information and did not seek copies, the district retained attorneys (again using our tax dollars) to copy and produce to me each and every page including many documents that are copyrighted and many more that included confidential student information. 

I expect HB 2564 will be successfully challenged in court.  The Texas Public Information Act specifically requires governmental bodies to “treat all requestors equally.”  The bill clearly conflicts with current law in the Texas Public Information Act which states “The officer for public information or the officer's agent shall treat all requests for information uniformly without regard to the position or occupation of the requestor, the person on whose behalf the request is made, or the status of the individual as a member of the media.”  HB 2564 gives preferential treatment to certain requestors and discriminates against others.  Nola Wellman, the Eanes ISD board members, and our lawmakers should reread another significant part of Chapter 552 "The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know."  

I acknowledge the district’s continuing resistance to open government as well as its policy and practice of retaining attorneys and lobbyists in a tremendous effort to keep our public information private.  A tax-funded effort to deny information access to taxpayers.   However, together with a rapidly growing group of concerned citizens across the state, I will continue to advocate for accountability and transparency in government.  I will continue to attend school board meetings, serve as resource for others, and post the Eanes ISD check register and other very public information on my site www.keepeanesinformed.com.  I will also continue to advocate for children’s rights especially in the public education arena.  The first step to any change is access to information.

Again, how a school district responds to requests for public information says much about trust and confidence.

Dianna Pharr  

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Some officials don't like to let in the sunshine - (07.04.2005 - Austin American-Statesman)
Public access to government meetings and records is the law in Texas, but it's not always accepted easily. Some public bodies and officials react to open government inquiries like vampires to daylight …

In Westlake, Eanes school officials, feeling besieged by parents who pepper them with requests for information, have not responded well. Officials have objected to releasing the documents and supported a bill by the community's state representative, Todd Baxter, to charge higher fees for anyone seeking more than 50 pages a month. The bill died.

Eanes Superintendent Nola Wellman argued that the open records authors never intended for the school district to bear the cost of providing records. But Eanes officials could mitigate those costs by putting the records on the Internet or otherwise making them easily accessible. Instead, they chose to fight and pay huge legal fees.

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Commentary:  Crack open schools' books 

By Chris Patterson - Thursday, April 28, 2005 (Austin American Statesman)

What enterprise do you suppose wrote checks amounting to $1.6 million for lawyers, $375,000 for various chambers of commerce, $311,000 for professional association fees, $90,000 for Franklin Covey (personal effectiveness and productivity training), $14,500 for Billie Arbuckle Adventures and $2.7 million for Young Audiences of North Texas (arts and cultural programs)?

Would you be surprised to learn it was a Texas public school district?

These expenditures occurred when the district claimed it was "forced" to dismiss several hundred high school teachers because of "inadequate" funding. And when it was suing Texans for more tax dollars. The district? Dallas Independent School District, according to a review of their check register last spring.

Dallas is not alone; its books were just the easiest to crack, which explains how the education bureaucracy gets away with claims of "inadequate" funding.

Public schools simply do not keep accounting books that clearly identify how money is spent. Although districts make megabytes of financial data available on the Internet, the state's reporting system is so Byzantine that it's impossible for Texans to get a handle on how school spending is directed into true academic outcomes.

School finance reform offers the perfect opportunity to introduce a reporting system that opens the books to taxpayers in a clear, direct way. The Texas Legislature should seize this opportunity to craft legislation that improves school accounting practices.

The Texas House, in House Bill 2, called for greater clarity in school spending by requiring more disclosure. The bill requires schools to provide more detail about non-instructional spending — identifying money spent on memberships and lobbying. This is a definite step forward, a strong improvement over current accounting practices. But it does not go far enough.

As the Texas Senate takes up its own version of school finance reform, it, too, must make every effort to restore our confidence that reporting on school spending is more than another Enron-style accounting scheme.

The accounting ledger must differentiate between expenditures on mandatory, direct classroom costs and optional programs.

What cannot happen is the watering down of meaningful reporting with the inclusion of items such as "school leadership," "curriculum development" and "counseling services" as direct instructional costs.

If the lobbyists representing school administrators have their way in this debate, almost anything a school does would be identified as instructional expenditures — just like it is today. Of course, that makes as much sense as counting everything in a kitchen as nutrition-related spending.

School administrators want to continue to claim that inadequate funding forces them to fire elementary school reading teachers, while being able to pay chamber of commerce dues and construct tennis courts, and using our tax dollars to hire lawyers who sue us for higher state taxes.

Our hope for getting schools to open their books to scrutiny rests now with the Texas Senate, then with the Legislature's conference committee. We must get this right; it is unlikely we will have another chance to improve school accounting practices for a decade.

Texans deserve full, clear access to the information needed to control wasteful spending and improve public education. And until schools are forced to do so, Texans should close their wallets.