Friday, Nov. 06, 2009

Cracking open the school books

Following an emerging and highly laudable trend, the Grand Strand has seen a number of its local governments begin regularly posting their spending records online for anyone to see: first Myrtle Beach, followed quickly by Surfside Beach and, most recently, the city of Georgetown.

Soon, thanks to a little-noticed but likewise commendable new provision in state law, they will be joined by some of the area's largest governing bodies: local school boards.

Earlier this year, confronted with sagging tax revenues statewide, state legislators (including local Reps. Nelson Hardwick, George Hearn, Alan Clemmons, Tracy Edge and Jackie Hayes) drafted a law intended to give school boards more flexibility in writing their budgets, temporarily lifting restrictions on various fund transfers to help local schools cope with the recession as best they could. As part of that loosening, however, they included a provision requiring the school boards to post all their spending - including credit card statements - online for the public to see by summer of 2010.

State Comptroller Richard Eckstrom - who was the force behind the push for spending transparency first for state agencies, then for local governments - was appointed by the state to help schools with the process and, in that capacity, visited this week's meeting of the S.C. Association of School Business Officials in Myrtle Beach. When he started his address by asking how many of the county officials had begun on their Web sites, the one hand that went up was far outnumbered by the incredulous snickers around the room.

Berkeley County schools began posting monthly reports in August, Eckstrom said, and have found that none of the traditional complaints against the idea proved to be true. The startup cost and effort of printing the check register online was almost nothing, and fears that critics would use the information unfairly have so far been unfounded. On the contrary, Eckstrom said governments that post spending information online often see a dramatic reduction in public-information requests.

"I'm convinced that putting this information on the Internet is really the way government is going to do business in the future," Eckstrom said.

Despite the protests about state mandates among some school administrators, Eckstrom's office is finding more support and enthusiasm from the school districts than expected, said spokesman R.J. Shealy.

Though the voluntary effort by local cities and counties to put their spending information online has been gathering steam (Eckstrom now counts 15 participants across the state), the legislature's decision to mandate it for schools may be the final shove that brings Eckstrom's prediction true. Once school boards everywhere are posting spending online, we hope the local governments thus far holding out will come around - and if not, perhaps the legislature will see fit to extend the mandate to all local governments.