Want to contact your local school board member? Kentucky Enquirer says 'good luck'

BIPPS.org - Government Transparency

(Ditto for your school’s SBDM members)

In a huge, multi-page article the Kentucky Enquirer reported yesterday about the difficulty that parents in Northern Kentucky and Southwest Ohio encounter when they try to contact their local school board members.

Phyllis Sparks, a Boone County parent, made the general case:

“Boards are always crying out loud that they want parent involvement, but it seems as if they go out of their way to put up roadblocks.”

Roadblocks there are.

Some of the Enquirer’s statistics on how boards lack transparency are really disappointing:

• 21% of the region’s school board web sites don’t list upcoming meeting dates

• 52% of those board web sites don’t have phone numbers for all board members

• 25% don’t list all members’ e-mail addresses

• 11% of the boards broadcast meetings on local cable TV

• 0 – The number of the region’s 317 board members who list Facebook or Twitter contact information

• 3 minutes – Usual time limit imposed on members of the public who wish to speak at a local board of education meeting

And, the Enquirer finds that unacceptable, in no small part because of this statistic:

• $2 billion – Total amount of taxpayer money local school boards in the greater Cincinnati area administer!

The Enquirer’s on line article provides a summary of transparency for every school district in the region.

By the way, the Enquirer did overlook one useful source of Kentucky school board member contact information (I don’t know why the Kentucky School Boards Association didn’t mention this). Our readers may find the Kentucky Department of Education’s (KDE) on line schools directory helpful. This directory allows you to search out local board members’ street mail addresses and phone numbers. However, even this KDE listing lacks any e-mail addresses or social media contact information.

Also, anyone looking for contact information by searching the web using a local board’s name is very unlikely to find this KDE resource.

By the way, I took a very brief look at some of the school board member data available for other school systems around Kentucky outside of Northern Kentucky. I found no Facebook or Twitter information, but here is what was available in this very small sampling of districts.

Paducah’s board had good contact information. Only Facebook and Twitter information was omitted.

The Jefferson County board also did a fairly good job, though some board member’s home addresses were omitted.

When I Googled “Floyd County Schools Kentucky,” The district’s home page came up. The home page does have a direct link to the “board of education.” However, the board member information at that linked page only provides e-mail addresses. That leaves low-tech parents out in the cold.

In sharp contrast, while the Knox County Board of Education’s data is also linked from the school district’s home page, the actual board web page only lists board member names with NO contact information what so ever. Even if the data is buried in the site somewhere, it isn’t easy to find in a reasonable amount of time.

Sadly, the Corbin Independent School Board members’ individual contact data is also unavailable in that district’s web site.

So, congratulations to the Enquirer for highlighting a significant transparency problem. Now, let’s see which boards get their act together and which don’t want the transparency.

There is an additional school contact story in Kentucky, and it also looks problematic.

Just try to find your school’s School Based Decision Making Council (SBDM) members’ data!

Unlike Ohio, here in Kentucky a great many important school management decisions are not, and by law cannot be, made by the local school board. Instead, the SBDM at each school has powerful control over many important factors like the curriculum and the final allocation of spending. Thus, Kentucky parents should also be able to easily find contact information for the members of the SBDM, at the very least the information for the parent members.

Again, I only briefly explored SBDM member information availability, but there is a clear problem here, as well.

Turkeyfoot Middle School in Kenton County lists the names of all the SBDM members and tells if they are teacher or parent representatives, but all members only have the school’s street address as the sole contact information provided – No phone numbers, no e-mail addresses, no Facebook or Twitter.

The SBDM member’s page for the Crestwood Elementary School in Oldham County is even worse. It only lists members’ names.

Nicholas County High School’s SBDM page only lists member names and teacher/parent status, as well.

The same inadequate information is all that you can find for Owsley County Elementary School’s SBDM.

Given the important responsibilities of local boards and SBDMs, the relative insulation of their members from public access is simply unacceptable. Apparently, we need to have some standards for information availability, and we need that now.