Not by the numbers
Former teacher falls out of good graces with district over school-closure disagreement
Cosmo Garvin
cosmog@newsreview.com
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Though retired from the district, she was until a few weeks ago given access to the school district’s online budget data. It’s all public information, but most of us have to go through the district public-information office to get it. Swett got to pull information for herself, accessing the online system, called Escape, and the ability to generate reports on her own.
She says the access came from Superintendent Jonathan Raymondhimself, so that she might help the community better understand school budgets. Swett used her access and her knowledge to work with parents and with the many official school site councils—made up of teachers and parents and principals—who meet to figure out how to make the best of the limited dollars available to each school. She even formed a little nonprofit called Making Cents Work, to help school sites and residents navigate the sometimes bewildering terrain of school finance.
For the most part, Swett kept a pretty low profile, even when she saw things at the district she didn’t agree with. But she couldn’t keep quiet about the district’s mass closure of schools in Sacramento low-income neighborhoods. It didn’t make any sense to her, didn’t save much money, and much more money was being wasted or left on the table in the form of “categorical” funds from the state.
She said so, leading community meetings and working with others who are fighting school closures to come up with an “alternative budget.” She tried to talk some members of the Sac city school board of trustees, hoping to show them just how damaging and unnecessary the