For the third year in a row, the Department of Education has failed to provide lawmakers with clear records on how it spent almost $4 million on more than 8,000 trips in 2025.

Last month, the department submitted more than 200 pages of travel records dating from January to November 2025. But of the 13 pieces of information lawmakers require agencies to submit for each trip, DOE only filled out five — the general programs associated with the travel, the start and end date of the trips and the total cost.

Not included were the position numbers or job titles of the attendees, DOE’s justification for the travel and whether the trip involved meetings or training sessions. The department also didn’t specify whether the trips were covered by state dollars or other funding sources.

Employee expenses ranged from $2 for a single day of travel to $10,000 for a trip spanning eight days in May, although the report didn’t specify what the expenses covered or where employees and students went. Some expenses were the per diem rates employees receive for neighbor island travel, DOE Assistant Superintendent Brian Hallett said in an interview with Civil Beat.

The lack of detail has drawn the ire of lawmakers, who requested the same records from other state agencies appearing before the budget committees last month. In a year where the state is facing significant federal funding cuts, the department needs to account for every dollar it’s spending, lawmakers said.

“They don’t have the information at their fingertips, they’re not keeping records,” Senate Education Chair Donna Kim said. “That seems to be a common thread.”

DOE requires its administrators to track and approve employee trips but doesn’t have an easy way to compile travel records in the manner the Legislature requested, Hallett told Civil Beat. While DOE also struggled to provide travel details to the Legislature in past years, he said, lawmakers never raised concerns about the record-keeping process until January.

But some lawmakers and government transparency advocates say the department’s missing travel data points to larger problems with record-keeping and financial accountability in schools. The department recently came under fire from the auditor’s office for failing to track its costly efforts to cool school campuses and struggled to justify the rising costs of school meals to lawmakers last year.

The department is expected to face additional scrutiny around its finances this year amid recent leadership changes on the Senate Education Committee and growing budgetary concerns about federal funding cuts.

“When the work-related travel accumulates to almost $4 million, it’s important,” Sen. Samantha DeCorte said in the hearing last month. “We’re going to take it serious.”

Key Spending Details Missing

DOE’s reporting challenges stem from the fact that different supervisors and superintendents are responsible for travel requests, Hallett said, and trip agendas and receipts are submitted in lengthy documents, rather than spreadsheets, which makes it hard for the department to quickly pull details for the Legislature.

Leading up to the January budget briefings, Hallett said, the department hadn’t anticipated that lawmakers would ask for agencies’ travel documents and had less than two weeks to pull together the records. However, the Legislature has requested travel reports from state agencies every year since the 2024 session.

“It’s not that we don’t have all this information, it’s just not readily transferable into the formats that they want,” Hallett said, adding that DOE is still working on providing more details to lawmakers.

The reason for trips can range from fulfilling maintenance requests at neighbor island schools to professional development and learning opportunities for students and staff on the mainland, Hallett said. Some of the travel expenses used federal Covid-relief funds, rather than state dollars.

But lawmakers wouldn’t know these details simply by looking at the DOE’s report, DeCorte said during the hearing, adding that almost $4 million is a significant amount for schools to spend when the state is facing budget constraints. Earlier this year, the governor’s proposed budget failed to fund DOE requests for food costs and English Learner programs.

Already, the public’s trust in government institutions is low, and DOE’s lack of transparency may only exacerbate people’s concerns about how state agencies are spending taxpayer money, said Camron Hurt, director of Common Cause Hawaiʻi. While it’s not surprising that such a large agency like DOE would spend nearly $4 million on travel, he said, people are still entitled to know how this money is being spent.

Other agencies — some with larger travel budgets than DOE — provided the level of spending detail lawmakers requested leading up to the budget briefings last month. For example, the University of Hawaiʻi submitted almost 460 pages of travel records totaling roughly $20 million.

While UH’s report included the reason for employee travel, the job titles of the attendees and the source of funding, lawmakers also pushed administrators for more details about where employees were going and the value of these trips.

Lawmakers Seek To Scale Back Travel

Kim and other lawmakers are now looking to curb how much state employees are spending on travel. One bill introduced last week would set a two-year moratorium on employee travel funded by the state. Exceptions would include travel required for court appearances, federal compliance and administrative meetings.

The moratorium would still allow workers to travel for professional development and training, but agencies would need to confirm that a virtual option isn’t feasible before signing off on the trip. Agencies would also be required by law to submit an annual report to the Legislature detailing the purpose and location of their trips, the total costs and how the travel benefited the state.

“At the end of the day, we want to save the taxpayers’ money,” Kim said, adding that the cost of travel from some state agencies like UH has skyrocketed. “People have gotten very lax with these approvals.”

Kim said she hopes the detailed reporting requirements in the bill also provide more clarity on how agencies are tracking their travel expenses. In some cases, she said, it’s unclear how DOE is calculating how much their trips cost.

Since summer 2023, DOE has taken school administrators and students on more than a dozen trips to South Korea, which has used roughly $750,000 in state and federal funds, Kim said. But the department’s breakdown of the trips’ costs had some glaring discrepancies, she said.

For example, Kim said, the department initially said the cost of airfare was more than $2,600 per traveler for one of its South Korea trips but corrected the number to $900 when her office questioned why the flights were so expensive. While the department said the trips played an important role in teaching students and administrators about agriculture technology and innovation, the statewide benefits are still unclear, Kim said, adding that not all campuses have agriculture programs.

The department mixed up the estimated costs per traveler with the costs of airfare across four trips to South Korea in its report to Kim and corrected the numbers later that day, said DOE Communications Director Nanea Ching in an emailed statement. The trips informed DOE’s career preparation programs focused on agriculture and food production, she said, and showed teachers how to incorporate different methods of farming into their classes.

But the lack of detail in schools’ travel documents points to larger challenges with DOE’s record-keeping system, said Joe Kent, executive vice president of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaiʻi. Last year, the state auditor’s office said it was unable to track down records and contracts tracking DOE’s heat abatement efforts, preventing the state from fully assessing how school leaders spent $100 million on air conditioning systems.

“Paradoxically, the more information that we were able to gather from DOE and its contractors, the less clarity there was about how much was spent, where it was spent, and what it was spent on,” the auditor’s office said.

Lawmakers also pushed DOE for more details on school meals last session after school leaders said it costs nearly $9 to produce student lunches. In response, DOE released a report in December breaking down the costs of producing school meals, but only provided the numbers for broad spending categories like labor and food expenses at the statewide level and shared little detail about why the expenses were so high in recent years.

Members of the public have also faced roadblocks when requesting and receiving data about their local schools. Last fall, the department said it would take over 4,000 hours and cost more than $83,000 to respond to a parent’s public records request seeking information about sports teams’ budgets and documents related to athletics funding at her daughter’s school.

“When a department doesn’t provide diligent transparency,” Kent said, “it’s a sign that the department’s taking the public’s money for granted.”

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Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.