The Education Institute of Hawaii is suing schools Superintendent Christina Kishimoto and the Department of Education for failing to hand over all the budget data it is seeking.

The nonprofit wants to obtain complete financial records so it can create an easy-to-use online tool that shows how education dollars are spent down to the school level.

In the lawsuit filed July 11 in Circuit Court, the institute says the department has been withholding information in violation of the state’s open-records law, the Uniform Information Practices Act.

“Not only did the DOE refuse to provide much of the requested information, but the DOE failed to promptly provide responses to EIH’s requests despite its legal obligation to do so,” the lawsuit says.

“Instead, the DOE provided its partial production of the requested records in dribs and drabs over the course of more than one year.”

Lindsay Chambers, communications director for the Department of Education, said late Tuesday afternoon that it had not yet been served with the Education Institute’s lawsuit and therefore could not comment on it. But she offered a general statement on the issue.

“We remain fully committed to providing information in a transparent manner to our school communities and stakeholders, and we continue to make great strides toward increasing public access to our financial data in formats that are meaningful and user-friendly,” she said in the written statement.

“We have responded to the Education Institute of Hawaii’s requests for information and have, in accordance with Hawaii’s Uniform Information Practices Act, provided all of the information and documents in our possession that are responsive to their request.”

The institute says it is seeking general ledger line items, electronic budget data on revenues and expenditures, personally unidentifiable job position electronic data, pension spending and more.

Previously, the department has said it provided numerous data files from its Financial Management System to the institute, including general ledger records and electronic budget data, but there are legal limits to what can be released.

As an example, the institute requested actual salaries for every position, but under the state’s open-­records law, only salary ranges for individual employees may be released, according to DOE.

The institute contends it needs more granular data and that other states have provided such information to other private entities.

“EIH’s strategic partners have successfully obtained the exact same public records from dozens of other state governments’ education departments, nearly all of whom have willingly provided that data,” the lawsuit claims.

The institute is represented by attorneys Jeffrey Portnoy and John Duchemin of Cades Schutte.

Although the lawsuit was filed against the superintendent in her official capacity, it contends that Kishimoto is personally liable for violating the open-records law because she “acted in bad faith to chill EIH’s public inquiry.”

The institute, founded in 2014 by retired and current educators, says its goal is to improve public education. Its chairman and president is Ray L’Heureux, who was an assistant superintendent at the DOE from 2012 to 2014.