1. What did school district employees buy?
A: There are hundreds of these purchasing cards or P cards that staff can use to make purchases — book a charter bus and hotel for a school trip, buy supplies, order food, you name it.
In April, we did a report on travel expenses of the school district. For the second year in a row, the school district had told us that they don’t have complete travel expenses and it would be too burdensome to compile.
So they sent us records only of 30 administrators that we requested.
After we did that segment, the district apparently found the records, which totaled almost $9 million last year. So that’s plane tickets, hotels, rental cars, charter buses, meals while traveling.
Other large spending on P cards includes almost $17 million spent at Amazon, and $3.5 million at big box stores and home improvement stores, so about 40% of the spending was at these stores.
2. How does this compare to previous years?
A: Last year we asked for the school district’s 2022 credit card spending and were only given a total of $45.5 million over 177,000 transactions, without any additional details, like what it was spent on.
Again, they said our request was overbroad and unduly burdensome, that the records are not readily available. This year, they gave us actual spending records.
This is the first year that the school district is being transparent and giving spending records.
So we only know that last year was $45.5 million, we don’t know what it was spent on, and the spending increased by 16% this year.
Both travel spending and credit card spending in general were not provided last year, so kudos to the district for improving its transparency but we can’t compare very well to previous years.