| TO: | Honorable Gary Elkins, Chair, House Committee On Technology |
| FROM: | Ursula Parks, Director, Legislative Budget Board |
| IN RE: | HB882 by Creighton (Relating to the availability of certain school district financial information on certain districts' Internet websites.), As Introduced |
The bill would require the 50 school districts with the highest enrollments, as determined by the commissioner of education, to maintain certain financial information on their Internet websites.
The bill would require school districts to maintain the district's checking account transaction register in a searchable electronic format and post the electronic registers in a prominent location on their website. The electronic register would have to be updated at least monthly by the 30th day after the closing date of the most recent monthly checking account statement, and a district would have to maintain each transaction in the register for two years.
Additionally, the bill would require a school district to post to the district website the district's monthly credit card transactions for credit cards issued to the district or a district officer or employee for use in district business. A school district would be required to post each credit card transaction by the 30th day after the first date the district paid any portion of the balance due on that transaction. The credit card transactions would have to be posted for two years.
The bill would require a school district to post to its website the total amount budgeted for compensation for each of the following employee categories: campus administrators, district administrators, support staff, and teachers. For each category, the district would also have to post the number of FTEs and the average salary. The information would have to be posted within 30 days after the TEA posted the information submitted by the district through the Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS). The commissioner of education would be required to adopt rules for placing employees in categories.
The bill would require a school district to post its obligated and unobligated fund balances on the district's website. The district would be required to update the information monthly and maintain each statement of fund balances for two years. The section also would state that a school district should maintain a minimum fund balance equivalent to at least two months of the district's operating budget.
Based on the analysis of the Texas Education Agency, the largest ten school districts would require three new staff members and the other forty school districts would be required to hire between one and three additional staff members to organize and report all of the required accounting transaction data. The fifty largest school districts would also be required to invest in additional software, database capacity, and bandwidth to handle the additional load from providing large datasets.
Administrative costs for the fifty largest school districts would vary depending on how many additional staff members had to be employed and whether the district was required to invest in additional hardware, software, and Internet bandwidth.
| Source Agencies: | 701 Central Education Agency
|
| LBB Staff: | UP, RB, JSc, JBi
|