The Union County Board of Education has been the only school board in the state to show any interest in improving its grade on the John Locke Foundation’s Web site NCTransparency.com.

The site, launched in the summer of 2009, assigns grades to government entities — including state departments, counties, cities, and school boards — based on their success or failure in making public information accessible to the public.

When board chairman Dean Arp discovered his district’s not-so-satisfactory C score, he called the John Locke Foundation immediately and asked what he could do to make it better.

The foundation’s fiscal policy analyst, Joseph Coletti, said he didn’t expect any response from the school boards. Of the state’s 115 school boards, 114 earned D’s (80) or C’s (34). Wake County, with a B, won the highest grade in the state. Union County was the only one to contact the Locke Foundation and show concern about its rating.

Coletti said he was pleasantly surprised when Arp called and asked for advice. “He wanted recommendations, solutions to take back to the board.”

“Most districts don’t like to think about how their schools actually perform,” Coletti added. “They’re too busy thinking about how to get more money from the county.”

Arp, on the other hand, seemed eager to show people where the money goes and let them decide what spending was or was not justified, he said.

In a telephone interview, Arp said that he encourages a healthy skepticism of government.

“I have a personal fundamental belief that it’s government’s responsibility to earn the trust of the public, and to do that we need to be as transparent as possible,” he said.

He also said transparency is important because with more information, people are likely to ask questions about government regulations that make the public sector less efficient than the private sector.

Arp was caught off-guard by the rating. He said he thought his school board was transparent. Its Web site permitted access to the budget, an end-of-year financial report, and a list of salaries by job code. It hadn’t occurred to him to make available documents detailing up-to-date expenditures, contracts, salaries of individuals making more than $50,000, and teacher performance.

“As a member of government I have all this information readily available to me, sometimes I forget the public can’t see it,” he said. “It’s not that bureaucrats don’t care about these issues. Most of the time they’re not aware there’s a problem until someone brings it to their attention.”

Some strategies for improving transparency, suggested by the Locke Foundation, will be more difficult to implement than others.

For instance, Union County was dinged for not having a frequently updated expenditure ledger on its Web site.

An example of this user-friendly checkbook feature can be found on Wake County’s new Web page — WATCH. The searchable document allows citizens to “click” on any county commissioner’s name and see a drop-down menu of how many tax dollars each member has spent lately in categories including airfare, lodging, meals, and mileage.

The Union County school board hasn’t decided whether it will follow Wake County’s lead in what Arp sees as a complicated task. He thinks it would be difficult to keep an ongoing account of each expenditure by each individual in each school in the county.

“A real-time checkbook, posted before an audit, would give accountants heart failure,” he added.

Before committing to such an undertaking, he said he wanted to make sure the cost of diverting staff time would be worth the benefit of increasing public access to detailed, current information about government spending.

“We have to make sure we don’t end up with a major increase in cost and only a minor increase in transparency,” he said.

One suggestion by the Locke Foundation that Arp liked was posting a list of contracts on the Web.

“It provides useful information, and is relatively easy and cheap to do,” he said.

Arp believes disclosing the names of companies awarded government contracts, and how much those contracts cost, would prompt the public to start asking questions.

The number of companies eligible to bid for government contracts is restricted by what Arp sees as excessive regulation.

As an example, if the government wanted to hire an architect to design a building, it would have to hire a second architect to conduct a peer review. Not only would the architect designing the building need to carry $2 million in insurance, the architect contracted to do the peer review would also need $2 million in coverage.

Such requirements mean contracts usually go to big companies that can afford to meet government mandates. Limiting competition from smaller contractors can cost the taxpayers more money.

Arp said his school board usually assigns contracts from a list of contractors approved by the state, when local contractors might be much cheaper.

Although Arp is committed to making the school board more transparent, he said change won’t come overnight.

“The wheels of government turn slow, and that can be a good thing,” he said. “The goal is to take small steps, to test a plan in pieces, before implementing a radical change that might not be cost-effective.

“We’re in the stage of raising awareness about the problem and brainstorming potential solutions.”

Currently, he said, Union County is looking at other school board Web sites for ideas, discussing possibilities with the board’s policy and finance committees, and trying to come up with the best mechanism for putting documents on the Web.

“Organizing a Web site takes a lot of time and planning,” he said, but he hopes to see relative improvements over the next year.

“It’s not about the grade,” Arp said. “It’s about an essential need for government transparency.”

Sara Burrows is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.