How do you get a bunch of kids to a Milwaukee Public Schools budget hearing? Cut the funding for their favorite programs. "I think it's not fair that you guys are taking almost $100,000 from school," said MPS 5th Grader Claudio Hill at a recent district board meeting. Parents say the board's move puts fine-art programs at Bay View's Tippecanoe School, a fine-arts school, in jeopardy. "We trust these people to make decisions that are in the best interest of educating our children," said parent Susan Nolan. "And this is not in the best interest of educating children." But, while the board makes schools like Tippecanoe to do more with less, the I-Team got a tip that consultants hired by MPS still make millions. So who are these consultants that the district hires? How much do we pay them? And what do they do, exactly? We filed an open records request with MPS nearly three months ago. Last week, MPS finally gave us an expense report. Basically, a long list of payouts: who got paid, when, and how much. Turns out, MPS shelled out more than $9 million last school year, about three-and-a-half million dollars more than it planned to spend. Plus, many of the payment records the district gave us had incomplete or vague descriptions of what the consultants did to earn their money. Last year, for example, MPS records show publisher McGraw Hill got $318,000 to "provide all classroom s." It's one of many descriptions that simply got cut off. The Milwaukee Teacher Education Center got more than a half-million dollars, mainly, for "consultant services," and "instructional coaching" -- not very descriptive at all. Neither is "see attached narrative," which MPS left out, for other pay outs. The list goes on and on and on. "We think of the average person in the community that wants information, well, he or she is just lost," says Faith Crampton, who teaches school district leadership skills at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Crampton worries taxpayers will remain lost, unless they want to keep digging. District superintendent, William Andrekopoulos, refused our repeated requests for an on-camera interview. However, Jeff Spence, Vice President of the MPS Board of Directors, agrees getting clear-cut spending information from the district shouldn't be so hard for taxpayers to get. "It's our responsibility to respond in a timely fashion and an accurate fashion with all that information in a way that people can understand it," said Spence. Still, it took three months for us to get an expense report with a lot of stuff most people can't understand. "They're stalling," said Nolan. "They're dragging their feet on information they don't want to provide." Whether that's true or not, you can certainly understand why many parents feel frustrated that cuts to their kids' school keep coming, while consultants keep cashing in. To be fair, after spending a few days analyzing the expense report we got from the district, the I-Team did ask MPS for more details about what a few specific vendors did. A district spokesperson told us, for example, McGraw Hill got that $318,000 for a new software package. It took nearly a whole day to get that information. Now, think about how long it would take for the average taxpayer to get a better description for every expense on the list. If you have concerns about how MPS spends your money, call the Board of Directors at (414) 475-8284, or the district's fraud hotline at (414) 777-7878.