LINCOLN, Neb. – The easiest way for governmental agencies to conceal potentially damning information is to make it too expensive to obtain.

And there are a fair number of school districts around the nation that brazenly employ that strategy.

As a part of a month-long series on runaway school spending, EAGnews filed over 350 open records requests with school districts in all 50 states.

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Most of them were very cooperative, providing detailed spending records related to travel and personnel costs free of charge. Some required a relatively modest fee to cover supplies, postage and labor costs.

All told, EAGnews paid about $7,000 to cover those fees. That was not an unreasonable amount for so many information requests.

But some districts made astonishing financial demands that had to be met before they would allow us a glimpse of how they spend taxpayer money.

Of course that raises the suspicion that they really don’t want anyone to see their spending records.

On September 15, 2014, EAGnews filed a request with Lincoln (Nebraska) Public Schools to obtain the district’s 2013-14 travel records. Typically, this includes hotel, airline and restaurant costs.

Three days later, the district responded.

“The earliest practicable date for fulfilling this request is May 1, 2015. An estimate of the expected cost of fulfilling the request is $32,127.50.”

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Liz Standish, Associate Superintendent for Business Affairs in the district, provided no breakdown for how she arrived at that total or why it would take a minimum of six months to produce the records.

Either the district has really slow computers, or the employees who manage the money are pretty slow themselves.

Baltimore City (Maryland) Public Schools provided a cost range – $8,010 to $32,130 – to provide its travel records.

When asked for an explanation, district official Dante Blue responded that it would take 2.5 to 10 minutes to review each line item for potential information requiring redaction.

Why don’t district employees have this information pre-arranged for the public to view, with necessary redactions already performed? Did it not occur to them that citizens – or the school board – might want to review the information, because it is very much their business?

St. Lucie (Florida) Public School officials provided total costs related to employee sick leave free of charge.

But they wanted $11,543.32 to provide a breakdown of how much employees were paid for days not worked.

“In the 2013-14 school year, there were 4,790 employees with either sick or personal leave. Each employee potentially has two daily pay rates due to two salary increases during the school year. Each matrix for each employee, times two, would need to be manually calculated to obtain the cost of the sick/personal time based on when the time off was taken. We estimate the time involved to be approximately 958 hours.”

According to our non-Common Core math, the district contends it would take 12 minutes to make each calculation, or over 119 business days (based on an 8-hour day).

The St. Lucie district is a multi-million dollar entity with modern technology. If it would really take that long to calculate that information, district employees need to be trained on how to use that technology.

We also sought travel spending records from West Virginia’s Mercer County Public Schools.

District employee Kemberly Whitlow responded, “It is my understanding that there are two file cabinets with four drawers each – full of the information that you requested. If each cabinet contains approximately 10 reams of paper (which would equal 5,000 sheets of paper), then the approximate number of sheets would be 40,000. 40,000 times 25 cents would equal $10,000.”

Why in the world is this information still on paper in filing cabinets, instead of computer spread sheets that perform calculations in seconds? Are we to believe that Mercer County schools have not yet reached the computer age?

What would Whitlow and her colleagues do if the superintendent or an elected school board member wanted this information quickly? Perhaps that’s what needs to happen to wake these people up.

Nebraska’s Omaha Public Schools sought $6,985 to provide its travel records. Estimated time of completion? Seven weeks – or 266.6 hours of staff time.

Can you imagine a private company operating in such a manner? We can’t either. That’s because its accounting system would be antiquated and obsolete and the company would have gone out of business long ago.

Of course public schools have no such worries. They can be as slow and inefficient as they want, and the flow of tax money will just keep coming, year after year.

EAGnews sought to obtain the number of sick and personal leave days taken by employees of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, along with related costs.

The school district – with over 1,000 central-office administrators and expenditures topping $3.6 BILLION in 2011-12 – estimated it would take 80 hours to provide the data, at a cost of $2,743.30.

While this is by no means a complete list, the following are some districts that also sought ridiculous sums to provide public information to the public:

• Clovis (California) Unified School District: $1,800.
• Londonderry (New Hampshire) School District: $1,565.60.
• Copiah County (Mississippi) School District: $1,463.29.
• Baltimore County (Maryland) Public Schools: $1,350.