101 Iowa L. Rev. 807 (2016)

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Abstract

This Note traces the history of transparency in Anglo-American law, and how well modern American school districts reflect this tradition. In an increasingly digital world, the Internet offers an opportunity for school districts (and governments in general) to post for public view important information on their activities, including their budgets. In most states, finding a school district's budget on its website and determining how much it spends on its different responsibilities is quite difficult. State laws break down into three groups that regulate school district budget disclosure online: those that require no disclosure, those that require a basic posting of the budget, and those that have specific requirements to post the budget. Iowa and other states should adopt a progressive transparency policy so that school district budgets are easy to find and easy to understand. For an individual school district, this means posting a document on the main page of the website, organizing budget expenditures into comprehensible categories, listing these on a per pupil basis, and comparing the school district to similarly sized school districts as well as an overall state average.