School boards are designed to do nothing. Don't believe me? Look at what is happening with one Provo School Board member, Sandy Packard, who is taking her job seriously. Here is an elected politician who is trying to find out how money is being spent, but the district is doing what bureaucracies do well — stonewalling or overwhelming citizens and elected officials with paperwork. It raises the question: Who's in charge?

For over two years, Packard has been trying to carry out her fiduciary responsibility as an elected official by working to find out how individual schools are collecting and spending tax dollars and private funds. The district bureaucrats are telling her that it would require copying 3,600 pages, and she would have to pay hundreds of dollars to get the information. One would think that, after the publicity about the fraud case in the Davis School District, elected officials and school administrators would be solidly behind trying to be accountable to the public.

Parker's fight for accountability is a good example of the bureaucratic barriers government agencies create to protect and insulate themselves from public scrutiny. School boards have perfected that art; and legislators unknowingly contribute to it.

Here's how it works. Utahns believe in local control and thus fall prey to politicians who keep pushing for school boards. Politicians court voters with code words like accountability and transparency, but no one seems to have the will to make it happen.

Local control is now a myth. Truth is that you can pass all kinds of laws and regulations, but if you don't have an elected official like Parker, it's all political rhetoric. Professional education administrators have created volumes of policies and procedures to pump up school board member egos and "protect" them from having to make decisions.

The Provo School Board, like others, has the policy that a single board member cannot bring up a matter for consideration; the vote of at least one other member is required. The result is that an elected official is not allowed to represent the concerns of his/her constituents. In essence, some school administrators have created rules so nothing happens, while making sure all procedures are carefully followed.

The state of Utah's education system makes John W. Gardner's comments ring true, "The last dying breath of a bureaucracy is to write another policy in the policy manual." State and local school boards, their bureaucracies, along with the multitude of legislative committees, dilute the responsibility so everyone and no one is accountable for whatever the education system is supposed to produce. Where does the buck really stop? School boards are vestiges of the past; and, if you ask most citizens to name their board representative, they would draw a blank.