ady Budgetdown: When the Messages Start Piling Up...
Dear readers,
Over the past month, Lady Budgetdown has received message after message from readers. Lately there have been quite a few about the Saginaw Intermediate School District.
One subject kept appearing in my inbox:
Travel.
Administrative travel. Conferences. Out-of-state trips. Mileage.
When enough independent messages begin pointing toward the same page of the ledger, eventually the quill must wander over and have a look. 🪶
So I did.
I went through SISD's publicly posted check registers and identified the travel expenditures I could actually document.
And the ledger produced quite a suitcase.
Across three complete fiscal years, I identified approximately $882,000 in travel expenditures appearing in SISD's publicly posted check registers:
2022–23: approximately $339,000
2023–24: approximately $255,000
2024–25: approximately $289,000
And the partial 2025–26 records add approximately another $191,000.
That includes the travel I could actually identify in the public ledger, mileage reimbursements, airfare, lodging, conference-related travel, meals, ground transportation and other expenditures specifically identified as travel.
And goodness, there is mileage. Quite a lot of mileage.
Now, before anyone summons the carriage to tell Lady Budgetdown that an Intermediate School District has employees who travel throughout the county: yes. Of course it does.
The ledger does not tell us whether a trip was necessary, unnecessary, extravagant or perfectly ordinary.
It tells us what was spent. And that is what I am showing you. There is also an important limitation. These numbers are NOT represented as SISD's total travel spending.
Conference registrations were excluded from the chart. And SISD does not post itemized district credit-card statements alongside its public check registers. Therefore, if airfare, hotels, meals, transportation or other travel expenses were charged directly to a district credit card, I may have no way to identify those individual purchases from the public check registers alone.
In fact, SISD has publicly documented out-of-state conference travel by senior leadership that I have not been able to fully connect to expenditures in the check registers.
And if I cannot verify the cost?
It does not go in Lady Budgetdown's ledger.
No guessing. No filling in blanks. No accusations of improper spending.
Just nearly $882,000 in identifiable travel over three complete fiscal years sitting there in the public records, waiting for someone curious enough to add it up.
Apparently that someone had a quill. 👑🪶
Lady Budgetdown
With receipts and respect.
#LadyBudgetdown #SaginawISD #SaginawCounty #SchoolTransparency #TaxpayerDollars #PublicSpending #MichiganSchools #FollowTheMoney #PublicRecords #WithReceiptsAndRespect