A trustee without access to district data doesn't lose interest; he goes fishing.
He asks a parent how the high school is doing; he pulls a number off the state site and reads it without the footnote. He runs into your principal at a football game and asks how the test scores came out. Sure, she answers accurately, but without the context you'd have put around it.
Now you have a month of work. A committee question framed from half a number. A board president asking why he's hearing something secondhand. A principal who had to decide alone, at a fence with a cup of coffee, how much to say.
None of that happened because a board member overstepped; rather, it happened because he had a reasonable question and no sanctioned place to take it.
And here's where our instincts mislead us: we resist board dashboards because we're worried about oversight moving too close. But the curiosity doesn't wait for permission. It decentralizes onto parents, staff, and whatever a trustee can find on his own, none of which you see and none of which you shape.
The alternative isn't less transparency. It's more, with intention. You choose the measures. You choose the depth. You publish it where your school community is all reading the same numbers, and the conversation starts from your evidence instead of his fishing trip.