The good news is that Greeley Evans School District Six has finally learned a lesson about transparency…well, sort of.  Lack of transparency is a major reason why the school district endorsed massive tax increase 3A went down in flames.  In response to the public’s demand for more transparency, the school district placed its check registry online for taxpayers to see.  Each month beginning July 2009 is available in PDF.

The bad news is that the district provides no context for or description of the expenditures.  When I, as a taxpayer, must spend an entire afternoon trying to figure out why the district wrote hundreds and hundreds of checks, that is only partial transparency.  Then I am left to speculate how all these expenditures improve student achievement and graduation rates.

The district appears to have spent a significant amount of money ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands on various educational programs, management and IT consultants including Windsor Management Group, Ashlock Consulting, Alpine Achievement, Edison Learning, Didax, Avid, Raising a Reader, Educational Based Services, Dell Marketing, Sage Management, Greeley Dream Team, Pearson Assessments, Gallup Organizations, and Productive Offices and School Environment — just to name a few.

One check of interest was for $21,134.16 to Corporate Environments.  The company’s Web site (if I found the correct one) says it was founded

to meet the growing demand for state-of-the-art workplace furniture that not only enhances our client’s image, but increases efficiency and healthful productivity.

Exactly how does this help student achievement?

UPDATE:  Corporate Environments turned out to be a company out of Lakewood, CO, a division of Office Liquidators, which provides new and used office furniture.

Also discovered: more than $30,000 of taxpayer dollars to Colorado Association of School Boards, $1800 to the Colorado Eagles, and more than $7200 to various pizza establishments (some of this may be for fundraising but there is no way to tell from the information provided).

I give District 6 credit for taking steps towards providing more information.  Taxpayers should review the check registry, ask questions and demand more transparency.  Check out the Jefferson County School District for a fabulous transparency Web site that seems sincere in its attempt to provide taxpayers with information about how Jeffco spends taxpayer dollars.

I am sending a Colorado Opens Records Act (CORA) request to the school district to explain the reasons for some of these expenditures.  I’ll keep you posted.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 5:27 pm and is filed under K-12 education, transparency. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.