Stop the Unfunded Financial Mandate on Our Schools

I am in strong opposition to SB1029 (Brattin). While transparency in government is a vital principle, this bill is a solution in search of a problem that will create an unfunded administrative mandate on our public schools, diverting scarce resources away from students and into bureaucracy. We must ask who this bill truly benefits. Our school districts are already subject to rigorous financial oversight. They undergo annual audits by the state auditor, report expenditures in detail to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and conduct their budgeting process in public meetings where residents can ask questions. This bill duplicates these existing layers of accountability, implying that our current system of democratic oversight is a failure when, in reality, it is a strength. The specific requirements of this bill are a recipe for burdening our schools with pointless paperwork. Demanding a searchable, downloadable, and exportable "financial ledger" with numerous specific data fields, updated monthly with a 45-day deadline, is not a simple task. It requires significant staff time and technical expertise to compile and maintain. School districts, already struggling with underfunding and teacher shortages, would be forced to pull business officials away from their core work of managing tight budgets or to hire new staff to comply. This is a classic example of an underfunded mandate where the state dictates an expensive new task but provides no resources to accomplish it. Every dollar spent on creating and maintaining this ledger is a dollar not spent on classroom supplies, student support, or teacher pay. The bill's punitive measures are excessive and counterproductive. Granting the Department the power to withhold state aid—the very funding that educates our children—for non-compliance with this technical mandate is draconian. Threatening to punish students for a school district’s administrative paperwork errors is not accountability; it is educational sabotage. Instead of imposing a rigid, one-size-fits-all mandate that will strain local resources, the state should focus on its primary responsibility: adequately and equitably funding our public schools. If the goal is to make information more accessible to the public, the state should partner with school districts to provide the resources and technical support to enhance existing reporting, not pile on another layer of bureaucracy. We should trust our locally elected school boards and the professionals they hire to be good stewards of public funds. We urge you to vote "no" on SB1029 and reject this unfunded mandate on our public schools.