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Lawmakers consider $500,000 request to build school spending transparency dashboard
Summary
Representative Emily O'Brien told the committee House Bill 1329 would require school-level expense reporting and proposed using the state's Oracle Cloud to publish a public dashboard; DPI staff warned monthly reporting would be a new collection burden for some districts.
Representatives and staff reviewed House Bill 1329, a proposal from Representative Emily O'Brien to create a public-facing platform showing how legislative appropriations are spent at the school-district and school level. O'Brien said the proposal is intended to make district spending more transparent to parents and taxpayers and requested an initial $500,000 appropriation to phase implementation.
Representative Emily O'Brien, District 42, Grand Forks, testified: "Publishing school by school information will help ensure that taxpayers know how their money is being spent and we can hold schools accountable." O'Brien said the state already uses Oracle Cloud in its data center and that the proposed platform could be phased in over two years; she recommended using part of the appropriation to hire temporary DPI staff to help districts prepare data.
Adam Tesher, School Finance Officer at the Department of Public Instruction, told the committee some of the data elements listed in the draft bill — such as payment date, recipient name and detailed transaction-level lines — "aren't things we currently collect at the department." Tesher said DPI currently collects annual financial data and that moving to monthly collection and standardized vendor naming would create additional workload. He noted districts use a variety of accounting systems; some import directly, others use manual processes and QuickBooks.
Senators and members of the committee questioned whether the state already provides enough summary data and whether the bill would impose undue burden on small districts. Todd Beard, Senator and Chair of the Senate Education Committee, described an amendment that narrows the bill's data collection to school districts only, removing cities, counties and higher education from the scope: "the idea behind that was to remove the data collection for everything except basically the school districts." Beard said the change responds to concerns raised after the bill went to the Senate.
Committee members asked follow-up questions about ongoing maintenance costs and whether the $500,000 request would cover first-year set-up and continuing operations. Representative O'Brien said the request was flexible and intended to begin work rather than fund a long study; she proposed phasing the implementation and using existing DPI systems where possible.
Ending: Committee members did not vote; sponsors and DPI will continue drafting and will take the bill up again at the next meeting.
