Shining a spotlight on Texas School Systems: Peyton Wolcott
This article was published originally on May 31, 2007. Since then it has been updated. Please scroll to the bottom of this page for the updated information.
When Peyton Wolcott began volunteering at her daughter's high school in Horseshoe Bay, Texas eight years ago, she found it odd that her daughter had to raise money for her choir gown even though the school set aside money for costumes and uniforms.
So Wolcott filed her first Texas Public Information Act request-and now, after years of steadfast devotion, she has become one of Texas's foremost champions of government accountability and transparency.
On her website--which fellow activists call the "smoking gun of American Education--you can read case after case of government waste in education. In fact, one whole section is devoted to the uses and abuses of credit cards issued to public education employees. Former Dallas Independent School District Tech Adviser Marsha Ollison, for example, charged $92,000 on her district-issued credit card from 2003 to 2006-and last week, the Texas courts found Ollison guilty on three felony counts because $54,000 of these expenditures were personal.
After years of submitting public records requests, Wolcott has developed an effective system for public school transparency: the National School District Honor Roll, which honors school districts that voluntarily post their check registers online. Starting less than a year ago with five tiny Texas districts, the National School District Honor Roll now boasts 37 school districts, including Dallas and Houston. And, after Gov. Rick Perry heard about Wolcott's honor roll system, the Texas Education Association is now the first state education agency to post its check registers online.
In seven short months, Wolcott's system exposed $27.2 billion in school expenditures and now extends to five "honorable mention" districts outside of Texas, four of which are in Illinois. And, with the help of the Texas Public Policy Institute, Rep. Bill Zedler has sponsored a bill that would require all Texas districts to post their checks online by September 1.
Wolcott didn't stop there, either.
When Education, Inc. (Wolcott's name for school district officials, consultants, and companies more concerned with getting their hands on public money than educating kids) grew tired of Wolcott's continual public records request and tried to tamper with public records requests with HB 2264, Wolcott and three other mothers stepped in to put a stop to it.
Originally presented by Rep. Todd Baxter and backed by the Eanes Independent School District, the bill would have enabled school districts and other governmental entities to charge $20 per hour in labor for public documentation requests, after the first 50 copies or the first month. Because districts could determine the number of hours of "labor," the cost of viewing public records would have skyrocketed, effectively ending many such searches-which is, of course, just what the bureaucrats had in mind.
Wolcott and the other women, however, put their foot down. Despite harassment from Education, Inc. (they were shunned on campus, they lost substitute teaching positions, etc.), they visited each state representative and senator, armed with stacks of homemade flyers, to fight the bill. Their efforts paid off: the bill was defeated.
With all of her accomplishments, it's no wonder that in 2006, Wolcott was an honorary recipient of the Upton Sinclair Award (along with John Stossel) for her efforts to make government more accountable. The Dallas Morning News calls her "the vanguard of a revolution sweeping through school districts across America."
Peyton Wolcott, we tip our hat to you.
1. Since this article was published, several more school districts have been added to the National School District Honor Roll. As of November 9, 2007, 76 school districts in 6 states have been included, which, when combined, have budgets of at least $32.3 billion. The number of school districts listed is increasing each week, and recently the site received news of the first California district to post its check register online.
2. The URL for the National School District Honor Roll has changed. You may now access it here. The URL has been updated in the article above.
