SC SCHOOL DISTRICTS DEMAND MORE THAN $600,000 FOR DOCUMENTS

If you want to find out how South Carolina’s public schools are spending your tax dollars, it’s going to cost you more than half a million bucks.

That’s according to the South Carolina Policy Council, who sent identical Freedom of Information requests to the state’s 85 public school districts and was told, on average, that it would cost them $9,818.36 in fees.

The council said 13 districts demanded more than $10,000 for expense records, 10 districts quoted $1,000 or less for the same exact request, and everyone else was in between, for a total of more than $600,000.

The state Freedom of Information Act allows districts to collect fees “not to exceed the actual cost of searching for and making copies of records,” and the act states “records must be furnished at the lowest possible cost to the person requesting the records.”

But it has become standard operating procedure in South Carolina for public entities to exploit that section to keep a would-be requester from gaining access to the information. Public school districts seem to be particularly fond of this tactic.

Just last month when The Voice for School Choice attempted to obtain records from seven Spartanburg school districts, they were told it would cost nearly $20,000.

The council requested the same documents as The Voice — public records on employee travel, catered meals and training services — and was met with the same stonewalling from bureaucrats.

The worst offender was Greenwood County District 52, which quoted a charge of $217,192. By comparison, Sumter County School District Two and Aiken County both offered the data free of charge.

Those charges make perfect sense given that barely half of Greenwood 52’s expenditures go to the classroom, while Aiken and Sumter Two put significantly more toward instruction, according to the council.

And some of the excuses for the astronomical price quotes are hilarious.

The McCormick County School District quoted $26,405 for “hiring a temporary employee at $20 per hour for six weeks and 35 cents (per copy) for copy expenses.”

Now, note the fact that the McCormick County School District has a whopping 924 students. The Aiken County School District has 25,068 students. McCormick County wanted $26,405. Aiken County wanted $0. Something doesn’t quite add up there.

But apparently the folks at Lexington County’s First School District have nothing on the expensive “specialist” in McCormick County. Lexington 1 said they would need 20 weeks of work at $30 per hour plus copy expenses to fulfill the request for $24,000.

The Greenville County School District pulled a similar stunt, demanding $35,045.95 for 280.5 hours of staff time plus 15 cents per page for copy expenses.

Wait… 280.5 hours? Seriously? They couldn’t throw in that half hour for free?

But perhaps my favorite was the Beaufort County School District, who initially quoted $214,580 but then cited a “clerical error” and revised the sum to $55,388. And what does that money buy you? Why, 10,800 pages and six months of staff time, of course.

That’s right, they have 10,800 pages of documents pertaining to employee travel, catered meals and training services. Which means there’s a very good chance Beaufort County school administrators most likely run their school from the Bahamas. On your dime.

All of this, of course, surely has state schools superintendent Jim Rex doing an evil laugh in some remote corner of the Department of Education building.

Just to add insult to injury, though, the council noted that a proviso in last year’s state budget would have required local governments and school districts to post spending records online free of charge. That proviso was removed during the final days of state budget negotiations.