Brent Batten: Taking the budget to school

And that's not a knock against the schools' reading scores.

The scores need to be better, to be sure, but the problem with reading the budget has more to do with the budget than with the readers.

The school system budget, approved in September, is a conglomeration of computer printouts indecipherable to all but the most adept analyst.

There's little in the way of written explanation of spending or the rationale behind it. Some of what is written, a memo on budget philosophy, was authored by former Superintendent Dan White in February.

The result is difficult for anyone to make sense of.

That's a problem that School Board Chairwoman Linda Abbott and a handful of others are trying to correct.

The strategy is two-pronged. First, Abbott is advocating a budget committee made up of district administrators, board members and citizens to review and offer input on the budget at its inception. Presently the board tackles the annual budget in workshops during which reams of information come at members in relatively few hours.

Abbott suggested the budget committee idea to her colleagues a few months ago, but so far it hasn't generated much enthusiasm.

That's prompted the chairwoman to begin piecing together her own group of volunteers to go through the budget and look for ways to improve it.

One of those volunteers is Jim Lawson, an unsuccessful candidate for the School Board in 2002 who has a background in business and teaching. He's pushing the second prong, a clearer budget document.

"The district publishes a document titled 'Budget Status Summary.' It is not a budget because no information is provided which links the document with (the district's) values goals and priorities. ... There is no supporting text that puts the line items and data in an understandable context," Lawson wrote in a proposal to Abbott suggesting improvements.

Lawson points to Leon County as an example of how the budget process should work. There, the school district has formed a budget committee and its budget is presented in a user-friendly format, with page after page of explanation, along with the charts and graphs largely missing from the Collier County version. Not coincidentally, he insists, test scores in Leon County are generally higher while the per-student expenditure is lower.

Of course, no two districts are the same. In Collier, where a large percentage of students live in poverty, where many live in homes where English isn't spoken and where recruiting and retaining qualified teachers is always a challenge, changing the way a budget is presented might seem like a low priority.

But Lawson and Abbott argue that a clear budget format lets you focus on spending to put the money where it is most needed.

"If you can't look at a snapshot of where you are, you can't make a decision," Abbott said. "We need a way to provide information and not just data."

Brent Batten is a columnist for the Naples Daily News. To contact Brent, e-mail him at bebatten@naplesnews.com.