New school district check registers available

By way of Operation: Open Records 2010 we have posted some new school district check registers.  These check registers are available on our sortable database where you can search for expenses in fiscal year 2010 by date, amount, description of expense, etc...

Recently added:

• Laurel County Schools
• Whitley County Schools
• Warren County Schools

Glance through these expenses, it is your tax money anyway.  This is one expense in the Laurel County Schools check register I found that I have questions about...

It could be completely legitimate but when I see numbers like this spent at a hotel by a school district spread out over the course of a year, I think we owe it to ourselves to keep an eye on it.  I mean come on, $16,300.43 is a lot of money in hotels especially when you consider that this is just one of the hotels on the list.  There are others in the check register.

What do you think?

Operation: Open Records 2010 enhancements!

There has been quite a bit of activity on FreedomKentucky.org since Operation: Open Records 2010 started at the beginning of the summer!  We have started adding some charts and icons to better translate the responsiveness and information found as a result of the vast number of open records requests we have been conducting.

Charts, like the one below, are intended to help track the process of the request.  They will contain information related to what the request is, date, if it was responded to in the legally required three business days, if the information was obtained in the requested format, and if the institution/department dealt with was helpful. Here is an example:
 

In addtion, icons will accompany each request that will indicate the status of the request:

Hopefully, these will enhance the experience of Operation: Open Records 2010!  You can see examples here!

Open records update

Operation: Open Records 2010 marches on!

Requests were sent yesterday to obtain the check registers for the last fiscal year to those schools who opted to reply to previous records requests via their lawyers.  We talked a little bit about this when it was revealed that Grant County Schools (a district with 5 schools) paid close to $110,000 in legal fees in fiscal year 2009.

We have already received Grant County Schools' check register.  In FY 2010, the district spent $72,000 on legal expenses.  The good news? This time, the school district didn't have their attorney respond, it was someone on staff!  Maybe, just maybe, we finally got through...

Legal costs in schools, Fayette Co. "sustainability council", and videos...Thursday Links!

• NJ school district legal costs: An article discussing the increasing legal costs in the New Jersey school system.  This is a recent interest for our Operation: Open Records 2010 project as we have written about it here and here.
• Apparently energy managers aren't enough: I blogged recently about how stimulus money is being used to hire "energy managers" across the state to analyze and make recommendations to school districts about energy use.  Well apparently that's not enough...now we have a Fayette County sustainability council.  Not making it up, couldn't if I wanted to.  Maybe they need an education council to help with those underperforming schools...oh wait, they have one, the school board.
• Operation: Open Records 2010 - Update: Responses are still rolling in from our blast of records requests.  Check the project portal to see what we have been after.  More are expected to go out before the end of the month - and these will be really interesting!
• Here are videos of Jim Waters and Kevin Jackson discussing liberty, race in politics, the need for citizen involvement to achieve change, and much, much more!
  
  
• Help Kentuckians Take Back Their Freedoms! - consider donating to the Bluegrass Institute and support efforts for K-12 education research, forcing transparency in state and local government, and spreading the message of liberty across the state! Take action now!

Get your week started with...Monday Links!

1- Public Transit - The Cato Institute takes a look at the disproportionate percentage between spending and usage of public transportation over the last 40 years.

2 - Operation: Open Records 2010 - We have updated many of the records requests on the Open Records 2010 Portal.  We are working to promote transparency and accountability in Kentucky government.  Check out these requests and their responses!

3 - Closing in on a milestone! - FreedomKentucky.org is closing in on 1,000,000 visits!

4 - The Economics of the left: Unemployment Benefits create jobs - Check out this blog post about the myth of unemployment benefits helping to cure the unemployment problem.

5 - Friedman on Government and the Poor.



The Bluegrass Institute is hosting a "What would Friedman do?" lecture at the University of Louisville on July 30, 2010.  Learn more here.

You know what time it is...Wednesday links!

• Washington's Parasites Take Aim at Apple - government take-over of the car industry, regulation of soft-drinks, tobacco bans...yes, government intervention is getting out of control but don't mess with my Apple!  The Cato Institute takes a look at being penalized for success.
• FreedomKentucky.org - just a little plug for our government transparency site.  We are nearing a million visits and with each day our database of information becomes more and more robust.  Spread the word about this site and if you're feeling particularly saucy, maybe you can contribute some of your knowledge to help the cause!
• Followthemoney.org - if you haven't visited this site, you are missing out on a great resource.  There are so many things you can track here it's almost not worth listing them...just go check it out!
• Superintendent Reviews Update - we have continued posting superintendent reviews, check and see if your district is listed.  You may find the reviews to be surprisingly...well...glowing.
• Federal money, local jobs? - This CafeHayek piece is a good follow up to a blog I posted yesterday about the creation of "energy-manager" positions for school districts.

Legal costs and open records requests

In a recent post I discussed the amount of money spent on attorney fees by Laurel County Public Schools in fiscal year 2009.

I was curious as to how much the school district paid their attorney to respond to my request since the response I received was from their legal counsel.  I sent an open records request to obtain this information.  Sure enough, in compliance with the law, I received the invoice sent to the Laurel County Board of Education...

 

I shouldn't be surprised that all other expenses on this document were blacked out, leaving me with the sole $100 charge for responding to my records request.  Regardless, I'm still bothered by two things here...

1. Laurel County Board of Education paid $100 for an attorney to send a 5-page document in the mail.  Really?  $100? It was just a superintendent review (which you can see here), not classified information that needed consultation from an attorney.  Couldn't someone in the superintendent's office or the chairman of the school board fill this request?  Then it would only have cost about 44 cents!
2. This invoice contains 35 line items.  There are only 30 days in June.  I'm not the smartest person but this tells me that Laurel County Board of Education is paying for legal work at least daily if not more. 

Again, I'm not the smartest person in the world, but it seems like school districts could have someone on staff fill these requests rather than forwarding them to attorney's and paying way more than they need to for making copies and dropping a superintendent review in the mail.  In most cases, the superintendents themselves personally responded to my request for the evaluation.

When will we stop wasting money?

Oh no! Sound the alarm! BIPPS is posting open records requests!

Maybe the Kentucky School Board Association (KSBA) is a big fan of us collecting superintendent reviews from under-performing school districts or perhaps it makes them a bit nervous...Either way, they are continuing to report to their followers what we are doing.

I am particularly happy about the fact that they took the time to count how many districts we had posted; saved me the time.

The is page referenced in the above tweet is here.  Take a look at some of these reviews and let us know if you think they are adequate.  More than likely, you'll find some of them amusing.

I was very curious about the number of responses to records requests we received from legal representation...more on this soon.

The latest on the 2010 Open Records project

Visit the 2010 Open Records Project page on FreedomKentucky.org to see the most recent requests that have been made.  Of note...

• Requests have been made of cabinets to see obtain information related to their budgeting process
• A page has been created under the "Education" section of the 2010 Open Records portal that lists all the school districts who have responded to the superintendent review request.  There are a lot of surprises in there, check and see if your school district is represented!

Stay tuned, there is much more to come!

More on school district legal spending

Last week I wrote about some seemingly questionable and excessive spending on legal services by Grant County Schools.

This behavior seems to be the new "in fashion" for school districts.  For example...

We have noticed a high number of districts who use legal representation to reply to simple open records requests.  I think we all know that legal representation isn't always cheap.  The services obtained by school districts are no different. Last year we did a records request to obtain Laurel County Schools check register.  So when we received a letter responding to the request for the superintendent's performance review from the district's attorney, we searched our database and found out how much they spent with this attorney in fiscal year 2009...

That's a lot of money.  Now, granted, an organization the size of a school district is bound to employ attorneys at some point but isn't it a bit excessive to be paying an attorney thousands of dollars a month to respond to records requests when the request could easily be filled in-house?

Oh, I forgot to mention - This attorney also represents the Pulaski Board of Education. 

Is this a good use of tax-payer money?

How much do you think Grant County Schools spends on legal services?

So I hate to be the messenger but...

Yesterday, I posted a blog about how Grant County Schools decided that it would be a better idea to give the run-around for a simple Open Records Request (that had been filled by 30+ other school districts already) by opting to involve their legal representation rather than just send me the requested information.  I posted the letter I received from the nice folks at O'Hara, Ruberg, Taylor, Sloan and Sergent and asked this question:

Is it a good use of taxpayer money to involve a law firm in a simple Freedom of Information request when the request could have just been filled like all the other schools districts that received the same request? Furthermore, is it transparent?

Well, my curiosity got the better of me.  Thankfully, last year, we did an open records request to obtain the Grant County Schools check register.  And what did we find?  In fiscal year 2009, Grant County Schools paid a legal fee of:

                                                                    $109,727.81 

Wow.  A six-figure expenditure for legal services in a school district with only 5 schools!?!?? Help me understand this.

Comparable school districts, such as Lee County Schools (4 schools), opted to spend money on legal services by individual use rather than a one time expense and spent a mere fraction of what Grant County did.

• Is this a good use of taxpayer money?
• Why do they feel the need to retain legal services with six-figures
• Why couldn't they just fulfill the request?

This is why our education system continues to "need" money.

Records requests, run-arounds, and law firms! Oh my!

Operation: Open Records 2010 continues with some amusing results.

I received a letter this morning from a nice group of attorneys representing Grant County Public Schools. I requested the criteria used to evaluate their superintendent and a copy of the most recent superintendent evaluation. Here's the letter I received in response...

Now, really? Come on.

• Sure, I addressed it to "To Whom It May Concern" because quite frankly I had no idea at the time who the custodian of the records was. What else was I supposed to say?
• I've already received over 30 responses from other districts who were sent the same request worded the exact same way. No one else had trouble forwarding this letter to the infamous "To Whom It May Concern". Why did Grant County Schools have so much trouble with that?
• The most infuriating thing is that the letter was sent to the Grant County School's address, not the law offices of O'Hara, Ruberg, Taylor, Sloan and Sergent. This means that the letter was received by someone at Grant County Schools, forwarded over to the law firm (which I'm sure is not cheap) for the law firm to tell me that the person I need to talk to is actually located at the address I sent the first letter to! Wow. This is why our education system bleeds money: rather than comply with a simple Freedom of Information request, Grant County Schools chose to involve their legal representation.
  

Is this transparency in public education and is this the best way to spend taxpayer money?

Still keeping an eye out...We may have struck a nerve

So...I posted a blog yesterday talking about how the Kentucky School Board Association (KSBA) was keeping an eye on our 2010 Open Records Project and informed it's followers on Twitter.  It seems we've struck a nerve...

Yesterday (June 9), on the KSBA website, an article was posted about our 2010 Open Records Project.  This is a bit more in depth than the Tweet from Tuesday evening...
 

Interesting. Well, to set things straight, The Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions isn't a critic of Kentucky schools.  The Bluegrass Institute is a critic of poor results.

Oh, and there were 35 requests...on the first day.  More to come!

They are keeping an eye on us...

I blogged yesterday on the excitement around our 2010 Open Records Project getting underway with the filing of over 30 records requests for superintendent performance evaluations in under-performing districts.  It seems the Kentucky School Boards Association has been keeping tabs; they were sure to inform their followers on Twitter...

Yup! That's us! The evaluations have already begun to pour in and I applaud the early responders! A few "interesting" pieces of information have already been picked out.

More information on this project in the coming days, stay tuned!

Open the FOIA floodgates!

We submitted 35 open records requests yesterday as part of our 2010 Open Records Project! These requests were submitted to school districts across the state who have not made adequate yearly progress or have schools in them that have not made adequate yearly progress according to No Child Left Behind.

Stay tuned for more details on these requests...we hope to shed some light on under-performing education leaders!

2010 open records project: open season!

We just kicked off our 2010 Open Records Project!  In order to provide readers with a way to track the process and results of our project we have set up a portal on FreedomKentucky.org.  This will allow anyone to see what requests have been sent, their status, the results, and an evaluation of how responsive the state or local agency was to the request.

These requests will be targeting fraud, waste, and inefficiency in state government.

Take a moment and stop by to see what we have found already! If you have suggestions or thoughts on what you would like to see uncovered, let us know in the comment section below or email us.  An email address is provided in the comment section where your thoughts can be sent!