The North Dakota Policy Council hopes to shed some light on school financial information. The Sunshine on Schools project launched earlier this month compiles financial information, enrollment information and other school reports from the Department of Public Instruction.

"You can read it and understand it," said Brett Narloch, executive director of the North Dakota Policy Council. "All of it is from DPI. You can read it much easier."

He went on to explain that some of the information could "take an hour to find on DPI," and he wanted to make it more accessible, he said.

The Sunshine on Schools Web site is http://www.sunshineonschools.org. It has information on student to teacher ratios, revenues and expenditures, average employee compensation, extracurricular and transportation expenses and in the future individual teacher and administrator compensation.

The information is the same as what is available on the Department of Public Instruction Web site, superintendent Wayne Sanstead said.

"They may well put a twist on it to meet their organizational goals,"Sanstead said.

The Policy Council supports limited government, Narloch said, but the Sunshine on Schools site is meant to be informational.

A feature of the Policy Council site is the school district comparison. The council put this in after superintendents and teachers kept asking for information on other schools. This is possible because of the type of software the policy council used. It was relatively easy, and low-cost, Narloch said, and any governmental entity should be able to replicate it.

The DPI school finance department liked the comparison feature, but it is a matter of resources.

"It's just a different look," said Jerry Coleman, assistant director of school finance and organization at DPI. "I like what they're doing, but we don't have the software tools."

(Reach reporter Sara Kincaid at 250-8251 or sara.kincaid@bismarcktribune.com.)