We’re somewhat ambivalent to House Bill 237, sponsored by State Rep. Andrew Barreras, D-Valencia County. Barreras is taking advantage of a lean year to eliminate the demand by state law that public school districts publish their accountability reports in a newspaper of general circulation in their district.
Since all the school districts in Rio Arriba County, and Pojoaque school district too, have been routinely violating this law for the last decade, removing the requirement would just make them legal, at least in this regard.
This was a good law enacted in the early 1990s spurred by a demand for accountability in public schools because so many were slowly slipping off the end of the scale in test scores, violence and graduation rates. But which districts and by how much? Enter the accountability report.
School officials hate them. So much so they’re willing to violate state law and just not publish them. They believe they have satisfied the law by making some sort of report available to parents. Taxpayers are welcome to ask for one from your school district office but pack a lunch. You’ll wait awhile while they dream one up.
Supporters of the bill Feb. 13 said it was necessary to loosen the requirement because all the school districts in the state are broke and in debt.
Yet Albuquerque Public Schools can hand Brad Allison $350,000 to buy him out, much the same way Española’s Board just did to David Cockerham, on a lesser level.
We’re about to pay $50,000 for an audit to find out why the last two audits are late. That’s stuff out of Monty Python. We’re not making it up.
The District has money for raises for administrative people and teachers have gotten raises, some pretty good ones, over the last five years. A parade of administrators have come through Española taking the lead on one failed construction project after another.
They travel to vacation spots routinely on our dime. Three different credit card scandals in the last five years have taken thousands out of the general fund.
That’s pretty tough for lawmakers, school board members and administrators to say with a straight face, they can’t afford to tell the public, taxpayers and parents how well (or not) their school is doing.
Of course the big argument is put it on the web. Everyone wants to put everything on the web and check off the box for public disclosure and availability. That may work in Dallas or Detroit where Wi-Fi is available almost anywhere but in rural New Mexico or Wyoming, even Texas, that doesn’t wash.
According to the US Census Bureau at the end of 2007 in New Mexico:
• About 441,000 out of 806,000 households in New Mexico use the Internet at home.
Of those, 20 percent still have dial-up connection. Nationally, 61.7 percent of households used the Internet at home. New Mexico is far behind;
• The remaining 32.5 percent of New Mexico households did not use the Internet at all;
• Internet use is skewed to urban areas, the affluent and the educated. In other words, usage would be lower than the figures shown in rural areas, the more you go down the income scale, and the more you go down the education scale;
The Internet is not the answer to transparency. It’s an incompatible substitute.
Whining poverty while spending like a drunken sailor on leave is not a valid argument either. All school districts in the state, including ours, should follow the law and publish their accountability reports and the law should not be modified.