Transparency Should Not Depend on Your School District
Transparency should not depend on which Kentucky school district you happen to live or work in.
Some districts make salary schedules, financial reports, contracts, board materials, audits, policies, and staffing information easy to find. Others provide far less, scatter it across several websites, or make people file Open Records Requests for information another district posts online as a matter of routine.
That inconsistency exists because Kentucky has left too much of this up to district discretion.
Public Records Should Be Consistently Available
The Open Records Act gives people the right to request existing records, but that is not the same as requiring every district to make the same basic information readily available.
Why should one community be able to see something another community has to fight to obtain?
The fact that some districts already provide this information proves it can be done. We do not need every district website to look exactly alike, but we do need a reasonable statewide standard for what must be posted, how current it must be, and where people can expect to find it.
Records Retention Needs Attention, Too
Kentucky already has retention schedules telling school districts what records must be kept and for how long. But those schedules need to be regularly reviewed, clearly assigned, and consistently followed.
Employees should be trained on what must be preserved, including emails and electronic records. Record destruction should be authorized and documented, not handled differently from one office or district to another.
And retention should not suddenly become important only after someone asks to see the records.
Local Control Should Not Mean Less Transparency
Local control gives districts room to make decisions based on the needs of their communities. It should not give them complete discretion over how much the public gets to know about those decisions.
Everyone, everywhere, deserves consistent and transparent access to the same information.
Kentucky Needs One Basic Transparency Standard
Kentucky needs one basic transparency standard for every public school district that:
- Makes the same core financial, staffing, policy, board, and audit information available
- Keeps that information current
- Preserves the records the law requires
- Makes the information reasonably easy for people to find
Public information should not require insider knowledge to locate. It belongs to the public.