Posted on 04/28/2011 6:23:21 AM PDT by MichCapCon
A few minutes dedicated to government transparency was all it took to save one public school district tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars.
East China School District in St. Clair County recently decided to put its checkbook register online. The register outlines all of the district’s expenses each month. School board member Allen Reichle said this helped save about $60,000 when a local resident noticed the district had made a mistake when putting one of its expenses up for a bid. Reichle said the district ended up purchasing copying service from a new provider for substantially less than the district's current plan.
“We did not open up the bidding for one of our services and just went through the same company we had always [used],” said Reichle. “[Luckily], we had a meeting where a citizen brought this up.”
East China has joined the growing list of public schools posting their checkbook registers online, said Ken Braun, director of the Mackinac Center's "Show Michigan the Money" project. Braun has been encouraging all 551 public school districts to regularly provide this data on their websites.
“As this district has shown, government transparency has positive ‘real world’ effects,” said Braun. “Greater openness in government helps not only prevent corruption, but lays out exactly how public entities spend taxpayer dollars.”
Besides helping public officials do their jobs, Reichle has another reason why districts should be open with their finances. “This is a public school district; we serve the public,” he said.
“People need to see what’s on the agenda.”
The current list of schools known to be posting online check registers at the Show Michigan the Money website links to the check registers of 81 conventional school districts, two charter public schools and three intermediate school districts.
To see East China School District’s checkbook register, visit the school website here. The register is under the school board’s “meeting agendas.”
The State of Arkansas just passed legislation to implement a statewide open checkbook register for all state agencies. Transparency is a good thing.
“We did not open up the bidding for one of our services and just went through the same company we had always [used],” said Reichle. “[Luckily], we had a meeting where a citizen brought this up.”
In one paragraph Reichle says that they went with a new provider, but the quote from Reichle directly below that statement says they went through the same company.
This wasn't a mistake. It was corruption spotted by a citizen who knew the costs for these services.
The copy company was overcharging the district by $60,000 a year. There was someone who set that up for them, likely getting a good sized kickback, and the other non-businessmen who were responsible for the budget did not notice.
Billions of dollars are, through corruption or ignorance, siphoned out of the bloated education budgets in this country, but when you try to address them, they trot out teachers who cry about not being paid enough.
So tell me, poorly paid teachers, what do you feel when you realize that another teacher's aide could have been hired if $60,000 a year had been saved by not overpaying for copy services?
Ignorance breeds corruption.....transparency breeds success.
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