"We give the board whatever information they want ... ," Smith said. "So you have a board member who really wants it, I view it is just like a regular person coming in and saying, 'I want this information."'

Carol Lear, an attorney who represents the Utah State Office of Education, said there is some ambiguity in the GRAMA law.

"As a board member she should have access to information from the district office," Lear said. "However, typically, the district office would respond to the board but not necessarily to individual board members. But the law is not that clear on which has to happen."

In the Jordan School District, no board member has asked to see such detailed financial data "but certainly the school board has access to anything they wanted to see," spokesman Mike Kelley said.

In the Granite School District, principals are the keepers of their own financial data, and the school board only studies the district office's monthly expenses.

In the Alpine School District, board members have never asked for such detail in the past, but they see any school check for $500 or more.

Provo Superintendent Randy Merrill said "out-of-the-ordinary" requests must be made by the school board president. "It's their own rules, their own policies that they have," Merrill said.

But Packard said the school board's rules of governance were only passed in draft form and were never revisited as was intended.

School board President Darryl Alder did not know how the majority of the board feels now that an official GRAMA request has been made.

But board member Carolyn Wright believes the office should try to work with Packard.

"The district office needs to supply the kind of information a board member needs to do her job," Wright said. "And we each have different needs to do our jobs."

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E-mail: lhancock@desnews.com