My conversation during the Kentucky Board of Education meeting last week with Kentucky Department of Education Associate Commissioner Hiren Desai confirms our new “Bang for the Buck 2012: How efficient are Kentucky’s schools” report is helping the effort to improve education accounting activities in the state.

Our report has helped local district finance folks appreciate the importance of a Kentucky Department of Education project to move from storing each district’s financial data on a local district server to placing all of the information in one, easily accessible web location in “The Cloud.” That change will allow financial experts at the department to directly and efficiently access data from local districts, a process currently overly complicated by the fact that the fiscal information resides in 174 databases at the school district level.

By December 2012, 173 school districts will have transitioned to “The Cloud.” Desai informs me that the data will be also be backed up and secured at two separate disaster recovery sites. Multiple security safeguards will also be in place to protect the confidentiality of this sensitive data.

Associate Commissioner Desai told me that other collaborative efforts to improve the MUNIS financial system are also in the works. One key plan is a badly needed and ongoing effort to review and update the necessary training and minimum qualifications for district finance officers. The department is coordinating with the Kentucky Association of School Business Officials (KASBO) and the School Financial Management Institute (SFMI) at the University of Kentucky College of Business and Economics on this joint initiative.

Feedback to us from multiple sources regarding our Bang for the Buck 2012 study indicates considerable concern both in Frankfort and the field regarding the training and qualifications of not only district finance officers but also administrative and data entry staff at the local level. This issue reportedly is related to fiscal entry errors. That, as we noted in our report, makes the current MUNIS data inconsistent from district to district, severely impeding any attempts to conduct more detailed bang for the buck studies.

Desai noted that the Kentucky Department of Education recognizes the importance of good data quality and created a Division of Enterprise Data in 2010 to coordinate such efforts. Desai complimented the report from the Bluegrass Institute as helping to focus this conversation, shining a critical spotlight on the need for good and accurate data at all levels. The discussions generated by our report are helping to make the case that many changes desired by both the department and local finance officers really are needed.