School Bond Transparency Report Card (2020)

Since its establishment in 1988, the San Diego Taxpayers Educational Foundation (SDTEF) has conducted research on issues relevant to taxpayers, including the transparency of public institutions that are funded by taxpayer dollars. Taxpayers should be able to easily determine whether school district officials have carried out their promises to effectively use funds to construct new buildings and upgrade facilities. 

Schools should be as transparent as possible with their bond program information and how they are allocating funds, so the purpose of this report is to evaluate whether San Diego schools with active bond programs are meeting the standards of transparency. This report is the most recent update of the SDTEF 2007 study, which created the San Diego County Taxpayers Association’s “Oversight Committee Best Practices,” last amended in May 2019, to appraise the transparency of schools’ Independent Citizen Oversight Committees (ICOCs). It should be noted that the scope of this study evaluates only the transparency and not the quality of bond programs, measuring the public existence of information needed for taxpayers to assess the overall performance of school bond programs. We do not evaluate the accountability of schools’ bond programs, and whether they are honestly listing their spending. We can only evaluate the extent to which they make their bond materials publicly available. The Transparency Report Card does not comment on the quality of material available or ease of access. Our recommendations at the end of this report, however, suggest how to improve these aspects of a district’s bond program.

This year, there was a region wide downward trend of scores. Of the twenty-five fully evaluated school districts, the average transparency grade of ICOCs was 88.7%, down from 91.8% in 2019. Unfortunately, there were no perfect scores this year, since none of the schools met the last two requirements: performance audits still remained very narrow in scope and did not meet the SDCTA minimum standards for oversight committee best practices, and no school districts passed a resolution to require a set of standards for performance audits that would give ICOCs more freedom to contribute and improve the bond program’s transparency. After warning the districts of these concerns about Performance Audits every year, SDTEF hopes that the official counting of these points will encourage districts to widen their scope and thus improve the transparency of their reports in following years. Of the twenty-nine districts, only six failed to meet at least 70% of the criteria examined. Eighteen out of twenty-nine school districts (62%) met over 85% of the categories, compared to 80% in 2019.