Across Missouri, public officials routinely delay, dodge, or deny access to information that taxpayers are entitled to. They charge outrageous fees, cite vague exemptions, lose track of requests, or hide behind non-disclosure agreements, treating transparency as a nuisance rather than a requirement.

Years ago my colleagues wrote about the prohibitively high fees municipalities sought just to turn over the most basic financial data—the city checkbook. That’s just the beginning.

Consider Kansas City’s downtown ballpark negotiations. Mayor Quinton Lucas indicated he was willing to share details, so I took him up on it. I filed an open records request through the city website. Having received no response for almost two weeks (state law requires action be taken within three days), I followed up only to be told that the request had been wrongly assigned and had been sitting idle. A city employee resolved the issue, adding, “Let’s keep our fingers crossed” that it works this time. Two weeks later I was emailed: “All responsive records pertaining to this request are closed records pursuant to Sec 610.021(12) because such records are related to negotiations for a contract prior to its execution.”

The Kansas City Star reports that the city is again in negotiations with the Royals to subsidize a downtown park. Elected leaders are apparently eager to make sure the deal is not only kept secret, but also that it avoids any public vote.

In August 2025, I asked the Kansas City Streetcar Authority for records about the construction costs of its new Main Street extension—reported to be the most expensive streetcar line in the country at over $100 million per mile. My request was redirected to city staff who told me the matter was under review. I followed up in late October and was told the city would contact me by the end of that week. It’s been almost three months with no update.

In one recent case, a state employee told me the data I needed would take just 20 minutes to find—but only after a formal Sunshine Request was submitted and processed. This person did not know how long that would take. I got the information five days later, and I was grateful. But it underscored a troubling reality: a process meant to promote transparency is now often used to delay it.

Then there are the NDAs. The director of Missouri’s Department of Economic Development signed one with both the Royals and Chiefs—and indicated in a legislative hearing that she may not be able to answer questions. PortKC even requires companies sign an NDA in its application. While sealed bids may serve public interest in competitive contracting, secrecy around subsidies undermines the very idea of public oversight.

Missouri’s Sunshine Law could be a valuable tool, but it needs to be refreshed and its exceptions narrowed. Doing so would not merely combat waste, fraud, and abuse, but would also encourage better public policy.

The post Missouri’s Sunshine Law Needs More than Good Intentions appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Two Clay County Commissioners, Jason Withington and Scott Wagner, as well as Jackson County Executive Frank White, stated publicly that Kansas City—which sits in Jackson County—made a significant offer over and above the Jackson County sales tax that changed the course of those negotiations.

What was that offer?

We don’t know. Similar open records requests to Kansas City were denied citing ongoing negotiations. Clay County leaders initially denied requests as well. However, the Clay County Commission was made aware of the records request and the dubious claims made to keep those records closed. On February 22, the commission agreed to release the documents.

The Kansas City Council should follow suit. As I wrote to all the members of the Council on April 15:

The City denied my records request (R012348-030124) relying on an understanding of Missouri statutes that allows for sealed bids to be closed. But the negotiations with the Royals were not the result of any bid responding to a city-issued RFP or RFQ. They were more likely similar to any negotiations for incentives that go through the EDC—which are all public documents. Even if they were sealed initially, the vote itself is a clear sign that those negotiations are ended. The documents are public.

Please exercise your legislative authority by directing the city to release these term sheets, any related documents and their various iterations over time. The April 2 campaign was dogged by a lack of transparency—the measure’s defeat is a clear signal that Kansas Citians should know more, not less, about these negotiations.

I’ve received no responses to that email. There is no indication that the city is in any ongoing negotiations. And even if it were, there is no reason to keep the prior negotiations secret.

The post Release Those Records, Kansas City! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For some background, Festus and Crystal City—two adjoining cities in Jefferson County—are planning to sell their shared municipal sewer system. That, by itself, is a good thing they deserve credit for. However, the cities never went out for open bids on the project. They negotiated behind the scenes with only one other entity, the Jefferson County Public Sewer District (JCPSD), on the sale. They went public in June with the proposal and have entered into a formal arrangement to continue negotiations with the JCPSD. (Nobody has finalized anything yet, to be clear.)

JCPSD is offering $5 million for the system. While that may be a fair price and while JCPSD seems fully capable of running the sewer system for the community, how do the cities know if it is the best deal if they don’t accept other bids?

I filed a sunshine request with Festus last month for public records regarding the potential sale. I asked for the available records. I received the response last week. The city’s response is utterly worthless. There is nothing in it beyond copies of prior ordinances authorizing the sewer system, recent bills authorizing the city to negotiate with JCPSD, and copies of public notices. There is not one e-mail in the response, which means either no city officials or employees ever sent an e-mail on this topic over the past year—or they are claiming every e-mail is privileged. When we asked why there were no e-mails in the response, this is what they wrote me:

The City has reviewed the records within its custody which would be responsive to the requests. In response to those requests, we have provided those records which are responsive and which are open under the Missouri Sunshine Law. As noted in the City’s letter responding to the requests, certain records of the City were withheld as closed records, pursuant to Section 610.021, RSMo (1), (2), (12), and (17).

In fact, total secrecy was demanded by JCPSD and the two cities right from the beginning, despite the fact that openness, not secrecy, would have likely led to more bids and a better deal for the cities and taxpayers. Here is section eleven from the initial letter from the JCPSD to the cities dated November 17, 2022, but not made public until much later:

Without the prior written approval of the other parties, unless otherwise required by law, neither the JMUC, District, nor Cities will disclose the existence of this letter or any information concerning the transactions contemplated in this letter, to any third party, other than such party’s attorney, accountant, or professional advisor who needs to know such information to perform his or her duties in connection with this letter or intend or the transactions contemplated by this letter and who shall first agree to the confidentiality of this letter.

This has been anything but an open and transparent process. The public hearings on this matter were held shortly after the proposal was first announced, and the two city councils voted to approve the memorandum of understanding with JCPSD the exact same night as the public hearings. (Officials voting the same night is always a red flag that a public hearing is a dog-and-pony show.) The cities took no other bids or proposals, despite being well aware other entities would like to bid on the sewer systems. Now they are hiding behind legal exemptions to not share any records on the deliberations and discussions of the sale.

Festus and Crystal City selling their sewer system to a larger organization, public or private, with more resources is a great idea. Going about it all in this manner, however, is terrible government. It may be legal, but it is wrong.

The post An Airing of Grievances about Sewer Sales in Festus appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Several days later I received a reply by, of all things, email! Thankfully, the Governor’s office sent just what I wanted: the statistics and sources behind its claims. I must note that the original graphic was updated after I sent the Sunshine request (e.g., the word “low” was removed from “Low Cost of Doing Business”). Also, while each of the office’s claims does correspond to a study, index, or ranking in the real world, your mileage may vary regarding their persuasiveness.

Some citations used by the governor are very subjective. Several of the statistics, such as “On-the-Job Training” and “Apprenticeships” were from Missouri Government agencies, which doesn’t strike me as the most unbiased source of information. The document I received also—somewhat—answers my question from the last post and clarifies the statistic as “New Apprenticeships,” but the website’s graphic remains unchanged in that regard.

In some cases, the claim is ambiguous; the second-place ranking for state-level veteran benefits is based on the number of distinct benefits offered but does not consider that one benefit may be much more or less valuable than another. Again, a very subjective ranking.

And even when the statistics could be represented more favorably for the governor, they remain misleading. The “Fourth for Personal Income Tax” is certainly not measuring the lowest or highest personal income tax rates. There are eight states with no income tax (nine if you include New Hampshire), and Missouri isn’t one of them. It turns out that the governor’s office was relying on a report that ranks governors, not states. The “personal income tax” metric is derived not only by the level of income tax, but how much it has changed over each governor’s term—the governor can thank his special session last October for getting him so highly ranked on this metric.

I do appreciate that the governor’s office didn’t drag its feet with my request and provided sources for each of the claims, but I shouldn’t have had to submit a Sunshine request in the first place. It should be standard practice for the government to include sources for the claims in the documents they produce and, more to the point, practice transparency without hiding behind a fax machine. Thankfully, there are organizations like the Show-Me Institute that employ summer interns who can hold our government accountable.

*pats self on back*

If you are interested in checking out the sources yourself, click here to see the .pdf file I received from the governor’s office.

The post Just the Fax, Ma’am: Dubious “Rankings” Press Release Emphasizes Importance of Transparency (part 2) appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A push by the attorney general’s office for the emails of professors and staff at the University of Missouri has academic freedom advocates concerned the office is being weaponized to stifle free speech and deter researchers’ work.

In June, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt’s office sent two records requests to the university….

“When I see these requests, it really makes me worried about how this kind of request for faculty information can be used to burden faculty or hassle them where they’re engaging in research or scholarship that state actors might disagree with,” said Anne Marie Tamburro, program officer for student press and campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE.

Your mileage will vary on the utility of the Attorney General’s undertaking. Indeed, the vast majority of the public has little interest in the behind-the-scenes decision-making of Mizzou journalism professors. But that has zero bearing on the facts of this case, namely that (1) the people of Missouri fund their public universities through their tax dollars; (2) the people have the right to be informed about the activities of their public employees insofar as they relate to their public functions; and (3)  the Attorney General has the same right to use the Sunshine Law as anyone else, and a greater responsibility to do so where he deems the public interest requires it.

Academic freedom is an important principle, but all it means is that professors at public universities should have the discretion to research and discuss their ideas within the limits of the policies set by those constituted in authority over them. It doesn’t mean that they are exempt from the rules of transparency that apply to all those who work for the taxpayer. If their work would be “deterred” (to use FIRE’s word) unless they can conduct it in secret, maybe it’s work that shouldn’t be done, at least on the public’s dime.

FIRE should be considering the full public policy picture here rather than acting as an apologist for secrecy against the clear interests of transparency under an otherwise unambiguous law.

The post Sunshine Law Applies to Government Journalists, Too appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Overall, the responses we’ve received so far in 2022 look generally like what we saw in 2021. Most schools either have not responded to our request for information or have denied teaching CRT. Some schools have opted to try and charge the Institute hundreds of thousands of dollars to get access to school curriculum, and many more wanted to charge smaller fees. What has been rare, however, is schools openly providing documents that include CRT-type material. Last year, the most prominent example of this was the Kansas City Public School District.

But another notable example from last year was the Hazelwood School District. Hazelwood was one district that provided CRT-related materials when the Institute sent requests last year, and at that time its curriculum included excerpts of the 1619 project being taught to fourth graders and materials provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center about “Teaching for Tolerance.” When Hazelwood responded to this year’s request, the district sent basically the same documents it did last year, though this time without any fourth-grade curriculum, indicating that content was removed from the curricula.

Our director of government accountability, Patrick Ishmael, has been critical of CRT concepts. But it’s important to remember that regardless of the content of the instruction, the public has a right to see it and districts have an obligation to provide it.

Hazelwood should be commended for its honesty and forthrightness in response to our inquiries, both last year and this year. Through two iterations of the project, it is the only district that to date has twice released the pertinent curriculum without any fees, delays, or complaints.

The point here is that if school districts are going to spend taxpayer money to educate students regarding a subject, including CRT, they should make the information available to parents. Ideally, all districts would be transparent with curriculum and would post it on their website or send it to parents before the start of a school year. After all, sunlight is the best disinfectant, and if government transparency can improve curricula, our schools and our kids will be better off for it.

The post At Least Hazelwood’s Honest appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

However, the most obvious difference between the 2021 and 2022 requests isn’t the quicker time frame and greater participation. It’s higher prices—far higher prices. If we had paid for every school to respond fully to our request in 2021, the total bill would have come out to $59,980.63. In 2022, we would have paid $908,192.38. The average requested cost was $3,332.26 in 2021; it was $26,711.54 in 2022.

A significant amount of the massive price increase can be attributed to a group of three schools in the center of the state that each charged over $100,000 (I’ll discuss these schools in more detail in a later post). Still, ten other districts raised their estimates by at least $1,000, with the largest increase coming from rural Neelyville, which asked for $56,218.95. In 2021, Neelyville said it had no responsive documents to our request and did not bill us.

It’s not clear what is driving the huge price increase from Neelyville. Given that we have received underwhelming and disappointing responses from both small districts and large districts, it would seem the differences in curricular openness depend mostly on whether there’s a “culture of transparency” at a school, not whether critical race theory is present in the curriculum. (Just ask Kansas City Public Schools, which readily provided its school’s curricula and posts supporting these ideas in response to our request last year!) If nothing else, it would seem Neelyville’s “culture of transparency” has declined in the last 12 months.

In the end, schools choose whether their cultures will include transparency or not, and the estimates we’ve received in our curriculum requests show a troubling trend toward noncompliance.

The post Inflation? Try an $800,000 Price Hike appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“We don’t have any of our records on electronic format,” the email read. “Everything is done by hand on paper.” I typed up my standard response to this type of email, asking Linneus’s clerk to copy and mail the city’s expense records if she could, and to inform us what she thought the copies, work, and postal service fees would cost so we could make a budget decision before she started working. I assumed that, like several other small towns before, Linneus would send an estimate, I would note it in an ever-expanding spreadsheet, and the case would be left alone until the municipal checkbook team could decide whether we would fund the inquiry.

Linneus’s city clerk, Patricia Brandes, had a different idea. After telling me she didn’t know what the cost for over 100 copies would be at the Linneus courthouse, she sent me one of my favorite emails of the entire municipal checkbook project.

“Maybe I could try taking pictures of them with my phone and email them to you. Would that work?”

That did work. Patricia sent me the cellphone photos later that day, and you can see all 64 of them for yourself in Linneus’s folder on our online drive. Although they may not be as instantly readable as the Excel sheets and PDFs sent in by some of our state’s municipalities, the images still reveal Linneus’s dedication to transparency. Patricia turned in every page of the city’s pen-and-paper operating expense record from July 2021 to July 2022, including amounts paid and names of vendors. What’s more, she was willing to take time to think of a creative, free solution that fulfilled our request, despite the limited resources of a city as small as Linneus. That’s a clear demonstration of the culture of transparency our project hopes to find in all of Missouri’s municipalities, and reflects well on  Linneus’s city government’s commitment to serving the public.

The post Clerk with a Camera: Municipal Checkbook Hall of Fame appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As it turns out, the ability to produce a city’s “checkbook register” isn’t dependent on city size. In fact, the willingness to share with the public how tax dollars are being spent seems far more likely to hinge on city culture than anything else.

And now with the benefit of some time having passed since our last inquiries of Missouri’s cities, we thought it was appropriate to check in and see how their cultures of transparency were holding up. The good news is spending records are already rolling in from cities across the state; the bad news is that once again, some cities are still giving us the runaround, if they respond at all.

If you don’t see your city yet on the online drive we’ve set up, there’s still the possibility it will appear there eventually; we are receiving new submissions all the time, so stand by for updates. And if you have concerns about how your municipal government is spending money in general, be sure to hit us up. My colleagues and I will be talking about both the positive and negative stories learned from this transparency project over the next few weeks, and if you have local knowledge that you think would be useful to that narrative, we’re all ears.

The post Municipal Checkbook Project Returns appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“With the assistance of Missouri’s Court Automation Committee, a statutory entity comprised of members from all three branches of government, the judiciary has been working toward this goal for a number of years,” Chief Justice Paul C. Wilson said. “Today’s orders will ensure court documents that are currently open to the public will be truly accessible to the public. These improvements will fundamentally change the way individuals access public court documents, while balancing the need to protect confidential information and ensure the overall security and reliability of our underlying case management system.”

The rule changes will not go into effect until July 1, 2023, partially due to the constitutionally required waiting period for certain court rules. The waiting period also gives the Court the opportunity to work with The Missouri Bar to educate attorneys, court staff, parties or anyone else offering documents for filing in any Missouri state court to keep unnecessary confidential information out of otherwise public documents and, when confidential information must be included, to redact that information to protect it from disclosure.

Giving the public access to the actual documents filed in Missouri courts may seem like a narrow transparency victory, and in some respects, it is. The average Missourian will probably only take advantage of the new document transparency system a handful of times in their lives; for example, they might want to closely monitor a local court case that may impact their own lives, but may not get the scrutiny or news coverage of higher-profile litigation.

Yet enabling robust oversight of government functions, even if used intermittently at the individual level, is a key good government reform. The purpose of transparency initiatives like this one isn’t to push every Missourian to constantly watch every function of government; ain’t nobody got time for that. But such reforms empower individuals and communities with the opportunity to oversee the governing system that serves them when they do have concerns.

In general, government should have to demonstrate why certain documents can’t automatically be made public rather than require the public to ask first, as is generally required under the state’s Sunshine Law. The state court system’s shift in policy is a positive step in this rethink of what government transparency should really look like.

The post Missouri Supreme Court Takes Solid Step Toward Greater Transparency appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The reason the state bureaucracy resists transparency is simple: the Sunshine Law in Missouri (and elsewhere) is pretty weak, local government officials know it, and many of our state and local officials are reluctant to share information about government operations if they can avoid it. Mandatory document reporting and spending transparency resolve this kind of problem, offering notice to bureaucrats and penalties for noncompliance. I’ve pushed for that reform for a few years now and will continue to do so until it’s passed.

Of course the ideas of “mandatory reporting” and “mandatory transparency” are predicated on active policing of those laws by public officials, like an attorney general or auditor. So I read with great interest an article announcing that the state attorney general’s office had launched a transparency portal of its own showcasing what the office had found in district curricula:

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt subpoenaed seven school districts Wednesday for information on surveys given to students, and also launched a portal which gives the public access to “objectionable teacher trainings and assignments” uncovered through parent submissions and open records requests. . . .

As part of the Students First initiative introduced by Schmitt in March, the attorney general’s office also launched a transparency portal to compile parent’s submissions and open records requests sent to school districts.

The Students First initiative, launched by Schmitt in March, is designed to “increase transparency in Missouri’s schools” and “ensure a quality education for Missouri’s children by uncovering and eliminating curriculum and policies and practices that prioritize politics in the classroom instead of student education and success.”

You can find the attorney general’s transparency portal here.

It has been remarkable to see how resistant many school districts have been to transparency even when the inquiry has come from a state office, but I think that’s emblematic of a state governing culture that holds good governance and transparency in fairly low regard. That the attorney general’s office has had to sue districts to get documents is a testament to the need for transparency in all facets of government, and I’m glad the attorney general and his office have taken steps to increase transparency while a bumbling state legislature struggles to catch up.

The post Attorney General’s Office Starts a Curriculum Database of Its Own appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

That’s where House Bill 2873 (HB 2873) comes in.

HB 2873 would create permanent email accounts with the office of the Secretary of State (SOS) where Sunshine Law requests can be sent to local government at all times. For example, Battlefield, Mo., might be “battlefield@cities.mo.gov,” or Clay County might be “clay@counties.mo.gov.” The simplicity of the system is its advantage. Residents wouldn’t need to track down everchanging contact information for a city or school district, because these permanent email addresses will always work. Moreover, the Secretary of State would retain a copy of all requests to ensure compliance from local governments. Local governments wouldn’t be able to plausibly deny that a request was lost within the recesses of the Internet.

What if a local government already has an active Sunshine Law email address? The proposal contemplates this, too, allowing local governments to have requests sent to the new SOS accounts forwarded to an existing contact point for Sunshine Law requests. Alternatively, they could manage such requests within the state’s own email system like you or I might with our work email, or with web email. Importantly, as soon as an email request was received by the email address hosted by the Secretary of State, the three-day clock for a response required under the law would start ticking. However local government chose to field these requests, they couldn’t simply ignore them or act like the email was not received. Indeed, the state would know better.

Also included in the bill is a fix to something we encountered on a handful of occasions during our Show-Me Curricula project. Some school districts claimed that the schools they manage were not covered under the Sunshine Law. This is, of course, nonsense, but HB 2873 strengthens language around who precisely is subject to the state’s public transparency requirements, specifically around schools.

Along with the Parents’ Bill of Rights and mandatory transparency provisions dotting a handful of legislation, HB 2873 stands as one of the most important transparency ideas of the 2022 legislative session. The bill would act as a check against local government Sunshine Law failures. It leaves no flexibility for schools to deny transparency requests made under the law. I look forward to its hearing and hope that it will pass either on its own or as a prioritized amendment before the end of the session.

The post Bill Makes Government Transparency Available to All Missourians appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

We continue to have optimism that, among other things, greater transparency will come to education,  unnecessary occupational licensing burdens will continue to lose favor, and health care reform in Missouri will continue to hew in a free-market direction.

But warning signs are starting to show up now that we’ve entered the new year. Stories like this one from The Missouri Independent suggest that rather than promoting transparency, Governor Mike Parson may instead be using state resources to protect state and local governments from the Sunshine Law:

Amending Missouri’s open records law to permit government agencies to withhold more information from the public — and charge more for any records that are turned over — is among Gov. Mike Parson’s priorities for the 2022 legislative session.

The changes, which were outlined in a presentation to Parson’s cabinet that was obtained by The Independent through an open records request, include a proposal to allow government agencies to charge fees for the time attorneys spend reviewing records requested by the public….

The slide on proposed Sunshine Law changes dubbed the proposals as “Good Government” reforms and described the changes as ones that would “benefit political subdivisions, the legislature and state government.”

You know who these changes would not benefit? Taxpayers. And that’s the point.

We talked just last year about how attorney fees are used to boost the cost of Sunshine Law fees, pricing people out of records they’re owed. Reintroducing such a barrier indicates the governor is misreading the times. Springfield officials—Springfield is one of the worst regions in the state for transparency—have also called for Sunshine Law limitations, and that tells you just about all you need to know about the sort of quarters this initiative may be coming from and why it’s being pushed.

In fact, if a solution is “needed” for state and local government to avoid attorney fees, that solution would be radical transparency: ensure practically everything that taxpayers are asking for is already public and online as a matter of government practice. This should include spending, curricula, and administrative correspondence. What’s not a solution is passing on extravagant fees to taxpayers—the people who pay to have these records created and who are owed access to them.

The Missouri House and Senate should not go along with this anti-transparency initiative. That at least one legislator has already put the governor’s anti-transparency priorities into his own legislation is enormously disappointing. Legislators should not let themselves be used simply because the governor asked to use them.

I continue to have high hopes for 2022, but I have concerns now that I didn’t have last year. State representatives and senators need to remind themselves that they represent their taxpayers—not the governor, not their superintendent, not their mayor. And anti-transparency initiatives like the one articulated by the governor’s office are antithetical to the interests of those taxpayers.

The post Optimism Remains for 2022, Despite Anti-Transparency Forces appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Listen: How Many Missouri Schools are Teaching CRT? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

While Lee’s Summit stands out for its fee demands, it isn’t alone in its dubious Sunshine Law practices. Last month the St. Louis public school district said it had no records responsive to my identical request of it and would send any if found. After a month without records being sent and after being told again it had no records to send, I informed the district that I knew it had responsive records and showed evidence, at which point the district suddenly, er, remembered it did have some of the documents I had asked for. Thanks to the insiders I’ve gotten to know and the documents I’ve received to date, I anticipate the “memories” of districts statewide are going to be jogged often in the weeks ahead.

It isn’t just some “big city” problem, either. A number of rural districts also have gotten my attention, with Morgan Co. R-I demanding $15,000 for its records. I’m still waiting for a list of how that number was arrived at. Districts and schools that received my inquiries but haven’t responded at all won’t escape scrutiny either; after all, they’re breaking the law by not responding.

The Sunshine Law process is pretty simple. Once a Sunshine Law request is received by a government body, it has three days to respond. Governments can charge reasonable fees for securing and transmitting documents, but they can also waive those fees when the documents requested are in the public interest. Agencies can and do consult lawyers, but in my experience lawyers aren’t the ones interacting with records requestors. Of the over 2,700 requests I’ve sent out to schools and districts, I’ve dealt with a lawyer directly only about a half dozen times, almost exclusively by email, and almost always in ways that would be indistinguishable from interaction with lay staff. In other words, it’s unusual when an attorney gets highly involved, but it isn’t always notable. The Sunshine Law process is that straightforward.

Some of the most outrageous interactions I’ve had so far are with districts that go out of their way to create the illusion of compliance with the Sunshine Law only to use supposed research and production costs to discourage inquiries and withhold public documents. By far the most eyebrow-raising district behavior in that vein has been from the Springfield Public School District.

On June 14th—about an hour after I sent out my Sunshine Law requests to schools and districts statewide—I received a phone call from an attorney representing the Springfield Public School District who (in short) wanted to find out what I was doing with the information I was seeking. I explained plainly to him that I was going to post everything online for the public to see.

The phone conversation, which lasted about half an hour, alternated between friendly and direct. At one point I was told that the only return I’d probably get would be for the term “whiteness,” and it would be from some art textbook. I chuckled that that’s always possible, but the attorney was quick to say that he was joking. The call concluded, and I waited for Springfield’s written response to my request, which was provided days later.

I mention the “whiteness” remark because included in Springfield’s very legalistic response demanding nearly $2,000 for records—signed by its custodian of records—was this odd tidbit:

A review of the District’s approved curriculum documents revealed only one book which has been approved in the past for use in the District’s High School literature classes, and it is not currently being used, that used the term “whiteness.” That book, Brave New World, uses the term once on page 15 in a sentence that reads: “…also pale as death, pale with the posthumous whiteness of marble.”

Am I to believe that in three days someone at the Springfield Public School District not only went through the curricula and lesson plans district wide and found nothing, but also went through books the district was no longer using by hand to search for terms and designate a page number? As the attorney suggested, the only term that the district discovered had to do with “whiteness,” and only in connection with something outside of the CRT context. Quite a coincidence.

I have contacted hundreds of districts and thousands of schools. No one besides Springfield has returned a result for a piece of literature, let alone one that was no longer taught. None have returned a result from an art or language arts class, either. In my opinion, Springfield’s was the kind of response a lawyer would deliver to flout the text and spirit of the Sunshine Law, and the demand for thousands of dollars was an added (but expected) insult that local governments often will present to stop transparency requests. This isn’t my first rodeo; we saw these ridiculous demands from local governments for their checkbooks, too.

I replied to Springfield by asking whether the district’s response represented the records held by the schools as well. I received a non-responsive answer. At the end of June, I sent a second Sunshine Law request for emails from within the district that related to our Sunshine Law correspondence. In July I got a response from the new custodian of records who had a remarkably similar writing style to the last custodian of records, and who now presented a bill for over $4,000 for that request, at a different and higher rate for “redaction and processing” activities the district said it would have to undertake. I asked for an explanation for that rate difference; I have received none.

I asked for the district to remove attorney time expenses, which is what the law requires, given the costs that were driving both estimates were related to redactions the district said had to be made and privileged correspondence the district said had to be excised. The district responded that attorney time expenses weren’t included. Really? So lay people are making the determinations about materials subject to attorney–client privilege and other legally sensitive redactions?

What is Springfield concerned about disclosing?

Sitting in the background throughout this process has been the fact that the Springfield Public School District is already under fire for the CRT-informed trainings it’s conducted with teachers. The idea that these professional trainings aren’t informing district curricula or lesson plans, explicitly and implicitly, doesn’t seem credible, and the refusal of the district to exercise complete openness and transparency in showing what is being taught to kids is wrong.

Parents and taxpayers deserve to know what their kids are being taught. If a district, school, or teacher doesn’t want to share that information, then they shouldn’t be teaching it.

The post The Unbelievable “Whiteness” of Springfield Public Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Listen: Lee’s Summit School District wants $40,000 to Answer CRT Records Request appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

$40,609.01. That’s what the Lee’s Summit School District wants to complete our Sunshine Law request. From the email:

The total amount that would need to be received to begin the discovery of the records requested would be $40,609.01. I do want to let you know that I have been conservative with the time estimates in order not to inflate the payment amount. However, it very well could require additional time, thus payment, in order to comply with all your requests. [Emphasis mine]

That figure looks bad, but it’s actually far worse than that. The main cost driver for the estimate is the request for whether teachers are including CRT in their lesson plans, and for that, the district estimates it would cost $35,997 per quarter!

That’s right—if you want to find out what’s in Lee’s Summit’s lesson plans for a full year, it looks like you’d be on the hook for over $140,000.

Organization and efficiency of reviewing all lesson plans would need to be a priority in this task. Therefore, I am suggesting that we review one quarter at a time. Each teacher has their own pay rate, depending on degrees completed and years of service. For purposes of this estimate, I will use the lowest hourly pay rate for a teacher which would be $27.69. I also will estimate one hour per teacher to review one quarter of the school year. For us, the first quarter will begin on August 25 and end on October 22. The total estimate would be 1300 hours @ $27.69 = $35,997. [Emphasis mine]

You can peruse the full correspondence at the link. We were able to get a handful of documents from Lee’s Summit prior to this demand; I don’t know what, if anything, changed since then, though it should be noted that the district has been in the news lately over a racial controversy.

Regardless, it’s not just startling that the district would demand tens of thousands of dollars for these records; it’s startling that the district apparently has no idea what teachers are actually teaching in their classrooms. Putting up an absurd barrier like this and preventing parents from seeing what their kids are being taught is bad governance. Lee’s Summit parents deserve better.

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Two months have now passed since our lawsuit was filed, and so far, the case is proceeding relatively slowly, which we expected. Unsurprisingly, the Office of Administration didn’t immediately surrender and decide to just hand over the documents it’s been giving the AFSCME, so we are still anticipating the case will carry on well into next year. In the interest of transparency, I would have hoped that the OA would have simply provided these documents to us without further delay—transparency for AFSCME should also mean transparency for the rest of the public. But unfortunately, it may take a judge to affirm this notion.

A little more surprising is the fact that AFSCME itself has decided to try and intervene in the case, arguing it has a stake in the resolution of this case. That’s surprising because our litigation doesn’t address AFSCME’s actions, but rather the actions of the government. Time will tell what becomes of this intervention, if anything.

We’ll continue to keep you posted on this important case.

The post Show-Me Institute v. Office of Administration: A Brief Update appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post A Deep Dive into Our Transparency Lawsuit appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But unfortunately, the bill appears to be facing headwinds in the Senate, where there’s talk of making the reform “voluntary.” That would be a mistake based on a host of misconceptions propagated by House debate of the bill and reinforced by a host of special interests who don’t want these checkbooks public.

First, the idea that “small cities” are going to be unable to produce these records flies directly in the face of the truth. Responses to our Sunshine requests show pretty clearly that despite assertions to the contrary, city size has basically nothing to do with whether a city could produce spending records, or even produce them for free. The following cities—all with fewer than 300 residents—are just a handful of the cities that produced their spending records at no cost:

• Centertown, population 278
• Filmore, population 185
• Lohman, population 163, and
• St. Thomas, population 263

What was doubly confusing about the House debate and subsequent pushback in the Senate was the claim that Springfield, of all places, would have trouble complying with the law. In fact, we asked Springfield (population 167,000) for their records two years ago, and the city provided them to us—free of charge. Springfield’s much smaller neighbor, Strafford (population 2,400), also provided their checkbook for free.

Meanwhile, their neighbor Battlefield (population 5,500) wanted $35,000. Why should Battlefield be able to price the public out of transparency? Why should any city be able to do that?

This isn’t about city size. It’s about city culture. And if someone tells you otherwise, they’re selling you bunk.

Second, making participation in the state’s checkbook database voluntary for cities would incentivize cities like Battlefield to keep their spending secret. If a city like Battlefield wants to charge the public tens of thousands of dollars to see how it’s spending tax dollars, why would it submit any information to the state voluntarily? Perversely, the city checkbooks that likely need the most oversight will continue to be the least likely to receive it. That’s unacceptable

Lastly, the notion that requiring cities to disclose their spending to state would somehow violate Missouri’s Hancock Amendment, which speaks to unfunded mandates, is ludicrous.  Nothing in the text, case law or spirit of the law of the Hancock Amendment suggests it would prevent the public from seeing how cities spend money. What’s more, cities already have to submit financial reports regularly to the state that include how much they’re spending. And a city can’t submit expenditure totals without knowing their expenditures.

These “checkbook” records exist. Cities shouldn’t get to hide them.

The post Springfield and Strafford Gave Us Their Checkbooks Two Years Ago. Why Didn’t Battlefield? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.