In less than a month, the Tucson Unified School District will face the real possibility of seeing 10 percent of its state-funded budget evaporate.

It faces even more layoffs than those already imposed by state budget deficits. It is looking at harsh cutbacks in academic programs, sports, student services. Everything, in other words.

And even if the district can persuade a judge to halt the state- imposed cutbacks looming once House Bill 2281 becomes law in January, the district faces a long, costly legal battle to keep its funding.

All this and more the TUSD governing board faces, in service of one cherished goal: secrecy.

The one thing the TUSD board can do to forestall the approaching conflict with the state over its controversial ethnic-studies program is the one thing a majority of the board is refusing to do: Air out the curriculum, books and materials of its ethnic-studies classes.

Supporters (supporters, mind you!) of the district's ethnic-studies program have been begging the board to appoint an independent panel of experts to examine the program's instructional materials. A genuinely dispassionate panel of academicians, the supporters argue, could determine whether the classes indeed violate the tenets of HB 2281, the law passed this year forbidding high-school courses that divide students according to race and teach hatred and sedition.

In a letter sent on Nov. 27 to the TUSD board, a group calling itself Tucsonans United for a Sound District implored board President Judy Burns and the other four members to authorize an open, impartial analysis of what the program teaches in its high-school, middle-school and elementary classes.

Claiming ethnic-studies course materials have endured more review "than any other in TUSD," a majority of the five-member board is refusing to open its ethnic-studies doors.

In fact, the content of TUSD's ethnic-studies courses is enigmatic and tightly veiled.

Contrary to the claims of its defenders, the program's books and materials have never been reviewed by the district board, despite its own Rule IJJ requiring it to do so. Twice since 2002, the board has rubber-stamped staff assurances that all TUSD texts and materials, including those used in ethnic studies, met acceptable standards. But as a body, the board has never so much as peeked inside an ethnic-studies textbook.

More recently, board member Adelita S. Grijalva has been touting a program "review" performed by an "outside panel of experts" in 2006-07. That review, reportedly performed by a panel that included ethnic-studies educators from outside TUSD, has never been released to the public. Label that insufficient.

Ethnic-studies directors have become skilled at declaring their program "transparent" while doing everything in their power to obscure the hard evidence of what they teach: the texts, tests, syllabuses, handouts and instructional outlines. Earlier this year, the Mexican-American-studies director boasted that ethnic-studies materials are easily accessible . . . to anyone filing a Freedom of Information Act request.

You want genuine transparency? How about putting it all online?

Today, the district ethnic-studies staff (and, reportedly, many of its students) are out of classes, engaged in a three-day conference in Tucson on how to overcome HB 2281.

They are ignoring the obvious: Appoint a panel of credible, disinterested academics, open the doors of these classes to them and the public, and let the chips fall where they may.