MUSKEGON, Mich. – It might be a simple case of bureaucratic confusion and disorganization. After all, those problems are hardly uncommon in public school districts.

Or maybe it’s just downright arrogance and disrespect for taxpayers.

Either way, we at EAGnews have learned that it’s very difficult to get public information requests filled through the Cleveland or Columbus school districts.

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That doesn’t fit well with the crucial concept of government transparency, and it allows those school districts to sidestep public accountability.

The lack of accountability is worrisome, to say the least.

The simple fact is that the Cleveland and Columbus districts each handle millions of dollars of tax money every year. We asked both districts for copies of their spending records for the 2012-13 fiscal year, and we haven’t received anything.

It’s been three full months since we sent our request to Cleveland and nearly two months for Columbus.

What’s the message they’ve been sending? Something along the lines of “thanks for the tax money, but it’s none of your business how we spend it.”

It’s not like either district rejected our requests on any sort of legal grounds. And it’s not like we asked for something that couldn’t be provided in a timely fashion.

Five smaller Ohio districts with fewer resources and employees – Toledo, Canton, Dayton, Akron and Youngstown – all managed to compile the same information and return it to us within a few weeks.

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Yet Cleveland and Columbus can’t seem to get it done.

‘The mailbox is full’

Our initial request to the Cleveland district was dated Dec. 13 of last year.

We followed up with phone calls on Feb. 5, 7, 10, 11 and 12 and with emails on Feb. 10, 20 and 24. We sent a second request, for administrative salaries and teachers union contract costs, on Feb. 14.

We haven’t received a shred of information from the district.

Just for the heck of it, we tried to make telephone contact this week with the official we were previously in contact with – Communications Officer Roseann Canfora.

On Wednesday we twice got a recording that said “the mailbox is full” and offered no other options for making contact. On Thursday Canfora answered the phone in her office and we told her that we had an outstanding public information request that was filed in December. She sounded as though she had never heard of us, but promised to look into it.

We’re not holding our breaths.

Our initial request went out to the Columbus district Feb. 5, and we followed up with emails on Feb. 13, 20 and 24 and a phone call on Feb. 19.

We also tried the Columbus district one more time on Wednesday. At first we talked to Communications Manager Jacqueline Bryant, who didn’t seem to know who were were or what we were talking about.

She referred us to a friendly, helpful lady in the legal department named Jeenah Trout, who took our information and promised to get back with us. And about an hour later she did, with the following information:

It seems our original request for information included the words “attention records officer” on the envelope, because most school districts have one of those. But Columbus does not, and the confusion caused by the wording on the envelope probably caused our request to bounce between offices, caught in some sort of bureaucratic twilight zone, according to Trout.

Only in government could such a thing happen.

Columbus officials assured us they are now working on our request, now that they’ve finally seen it.

We’ll believe it when we see it.

Something to hide?

Part of the blame for all this obviously lies with the state.

Ohio is one of only a few states with no time frame attached to its public information law. Most states give governmental units 10 business days, or some similar amount of time, to respond to requests for information, but Ohio does not.

The only standard for response time mentioned in the Ohio statute is “prompt.” According to the Columbus Dispatch, “court rulings have signaled … that waits of more than two weeks likely are unreasonable.”

Well, we passed the “unreasonable” mark a long time ago, but as far as we can tell, there’s no legal recourse to force the districts to pick up the pace.

The hollow law allows government officials at all levels to stick their noses up at taxpayers, if they so desire.

And in the case of Cleveland and Columbus, we could see where there might be some desire.

As mentioned above, we received and inspected spending records in recent months from five other Ohio school districts, and just about all of them had some spending that could be considered questionable.

We learned that the Toledo district, for instance, spent $5 million on severance pay for retiring teachers, nearly $4 million on new cars, and nearly $170,000 on hotels and travel agencies.

What might we have learned about spending in huge districts like Cleveland and Columbus?

Here’s one clue: In 2012-13, 71 employees in the Columbus district earned at least $100,000 in straight salary, totaling $7.8 million dollars. That’s the type of money that might be spent on administrators who get great academic results. The Columbus district does not fall into that category.

It seems likely we would have found a lot of other fishy spending in the two districts, which we’ve learned is quite common in large metropolitan school districts across the nation.

Officials in Cleveland and Columbus probably figured the same thing. Maybe that’s why their response to our legal request has been little more than silence.

They may not want to divulge the details of their spending, and they may not have to.