Oklahoma Education and You

Governor Kevin Stitt has called for an audit of how Oklahoma schools spend their money. Some school leaders have answered that the data is already there. In one sense, they are right: Oklahoma has required detailed school financial coding for a long time.  Districts already report annual income and expenditure data through the Oklahoma Cost Accounting System, or OCAS. OCAS began as a pilot in the late 1980’s, was codified in statute by 1991, and was fully implemented for revenue and expenditure reporting by July 1, 1992. Districts are required to submit annual financial data by September 1, and the State Department of Education posts that information publicly. Ask most of the folks in a school’s business office, and they will let you know just how onerous all of this is. 

The state has built an increasingly detailed accounting machine. Oklahoma’s accounting system is more granular than several of our neighbors.  Apparently, all that data has been sitting in the state’s servers like grain in a silo waiting for the market to rise.  

Hopefully, the market has risen. 

A serious OCAS deep dive can reveal how much a district spends on almost everything. For example, it can show how much schools are spending on bus drivers, cafeteria workers, maintenance employees, and activity-related stipends.  It also includes supply object codes for kitchen products and supplies, as well as cleaning, maintenance, and groundskeeping supplies. That means the system can be used to compare districts on matters the public almost never sees clearly: coach and sponsor addenda, cafeteria labor, bus driver staffing, maintenance payroll, and the recurring supply burden of keeping buildings open.

That matters because two districts can spend about the same per student and still be doing very different things with their money. One district may keep a larger share of payroll tied closely to classrooms while running leaner transportation, food-service, and plant operations. Another may carry much heavier extra-duty pay, more support labor, and higher nonclassroom operating costs. OCAS is detailed enough to reveal this if someone is willing to compare similar districts and ask whether the differences are driven by geography, age of facilities, program choices, or plain inefficiency..

Let’s hope Stitt is really trying to make things better rather than just looking to prove that schools are wasting money. If he’s serious, then this study will include the type of comparisons between districts I have described. That would be worth all the coding.