Editor's note: In recognition of Sunshine Week, Texas Watchdog is highlighting Texas heroes who have fought for greater government transparency. Learn more at www.sunshineweek.org.
For the colonists in Boston, it took a British tax on tea. For Peyton Wolcott it took a $426 bill for public records from a school district.
Wolcott doesn't look the part of a revolutionary. She looks like the neatly tailored earth mother who makes her own turquoise jewelry and starts asking a few innocent questions after volunteering for her daughter's school fundraisers. But like the tradesmen and farmers who didn't look like American patriots, Wolcott responded to events by answering the call.
Her answer is peytonwolcott.com, a rummage sale of a Web site, chockablock with commentary, news stories and links to studies under the banner, "How we take back our children's education: one person, one question, one school at a time." At its core are links to repositories on the Web sites where 810 school districts, 408 of them here in Texas, display each and every check they write.
There isn't another clearinghouse for taxpayers to check up on their school district spending like it in the country.
Wolcott, 63, and a grandmother of two, lives in Horseshoe Bay, about 45 miles northwest of Austin. She seems almost surprised at how far her drive for openness in school spending has come since she started in October 2006.
"I didn't do it for a headline or to win a Pulitzer Prize," she says. "I did it because I thought there needed to be more transparency. I did it because I wanted things to be better. I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do."
Wolcott did it as much because she saw that the wrong things were being done in the Marble Falls Independent School District where her daughter went to school and the Llano Independent School District where she and her husband pay their school taxes. In 2000, while raising money to buy formal wear for her daughter's school choir, Wolcott began to wonder why other school groups got their outfits and uniforms paid for. She also wondered why she was hustling bake sales while Marble Falls school officials were going to all-expenses-paid trips to conferences at lavish vacation spots.
When she didn't get the answers she wanted, Wolcott made her first Texas public records request, a request she now admits was overly broad. The district told Wolcott it would cost her $426 to get all the records she asked for. The cost made Wolcott angry and rather than pay it, she decided to get more involved in the Llano district where her tax money was going.
This time, the requests for financial records were more focused.
Wolcott and her volunteer allies discovered that five of the school board members had direct business ties with the school district. The revelation galvanized voters in the district, and in 2004 all five of the candidates sought out and supported by Wolcott's group won seats on the board.
"We got every one of them to sign a pledge that they wouldn't do business with the district," Wolcott says. "People loved that."
When people outside the district started asking about the clean sweep of the Llano board, Wolcott decided the message could be better delivered with a Web site. Wolcott knew nothing about how to put one together, but she did know that she would make it a goal to lobby school districts to post check registries on their Web site.
"It took me about a year. I made every mistake you could make," she says. "But in November of 2006 Dallas ISD became the first major school district in the nation to post their check registry."
The check registries for every large school district in Texas except for Austin can be found through Wolcott's Web site as well as more than 400 districts in 35 other states. Wolcott's work has won plaudits from state Education Commissioner Robert Scott.
Nicole Conley-Abram, who has been the chief financial officer for Austin ISD for only a few months, said she has not yet heard from Wolcott, but will consider posting the district's check registry.
"I don't know why it wasn't done in the past. I haven't looked into that, but I'm all about transparency and the need for people to know how their tax dollars are spent," Conley-Abram said. "I have concerns about the resources and means to maintain the registry but, absolutely, I'll be looking into it."
Wolcott isn't relying on the inertia of the Web site to carry out her mission to get the registry of every school district in Texas posted. She travels, cajoles and buttonholes school officials, all out of her own personal check registry. Although she has been approached, Wolcott said she has no intention of running advertising on the Web site, the better to remain unimpeachable. Wolcott can't think of anything she would rather do.
"I've been blessed with energy and enthusiasm, and I don't need a lot of sleep," Wolcott says, heading off for another school meeting. "What else am I going to do, play golf or Bunco?"
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