Lee County Schools Informed Parents Stronger Schools Brighter Futures

Lee County schools, in the open.

A community improvement initiative run by parents in Lee County, Florida. We collect what families, teachers and students are actually seeing inside the district, check it against the public record, and publish both.

Get Involved

Six committees run Parents for Transparency: money and accountability, teacher advocacy, testing and curriculum, students who get left behind, buses and buildings, and intake. Apply to join one.

Parents for Transparency runs on six committees. Each one owns a subject, decides what gets asked next, and brings what it finds to the monthly meetings with district leadership that start at the end of September. This form is how you join one.

It takes about ten minutes, and it asks more of you than anything else on this site.

The committees

Money and Accountability

Where the dollars go, who funds the people who decide, and what the board does in public versus on consent.

Short of: Anyone who can read a budget, chase a contract through BoardDocs, or file and track a public records request.

Teacher Advocacy

Class sizes, teacher load, and the supports that are missing: behaviour help, planning time, coverage, and what teachers end up buying themselves.

Short of: Former educators, and parents who can turn what teachers describe into something the district has to answer.

Testing, Grades and Curriculum

How a school grade is really built, what the grading floor moves, which materials get adopted and what they cost, and career and technical pathways.

Short of: People who like the arithmetic behind a school grade, and anyone who has sat through a curriculum adoption.

Students Who Get Left Behind

Special education, counseling and mental health coverage, food and nutrition. The students an average hides.

Short of: ESE parents, anyone who has fought an IEP, and people who can read a staffing allocation.

Buses, Buildings and Boundaries

Ride times, bus contracts and cameras, building conditions and repairs, and how attendance boundaries and school choice got drawn the way they did.

Short of: People who will map a route, sit through a boundary workshop, or read a maintenance work order log.

Intake and Community

The funnel, not the writing. The anonymous intake, source protection, the Facebook page, graphics, distribution and press.

Short of: Anyone who can hold a confidence, answer messages kindly, or make something look good on a phone screen.

This form is not anonymous, and it is the only one here that is not

Everywhere else on this site you can reach us without telling us who you are. That is deliberate and it is not changing. This page is different: a committee seat comes with access to sources, to documents, and to a room with district leadership in it, so we ask for your real name, a way to reach you, and a public profile we can look at. Nothing you write here is published, and nothing is shared with the School District of Lee County. It sits in a private database until one of us has spoken to you.

If you currently work for the district, this is not the form for you

We do not put current district employees on committees, on a roster, or in a meeting. The risk is not you — it is that a committee anyone can apply to is a committee anyone can apply to, and we cannot guarantee who is sitting in it. Someone who works for the district cannot be exposed by a room they were never in.

What we can do is hear from you. Everything current staff have told us has come through the anonymous intake, and that is what shapes the records requests and the questions asked at the monthly meetings. If you leave the district later, come back to this page.

What happens after you send this

  1. One of us reads it. That is a person, not a queue.
  2. We look at the public profile you gave us, and we check anything you disclosed against the public record. That is the same standard we apply to everyone we write about.
  3. We call or email you for a conversation, whichever you asked for. Expect it within a week.
  4. If it is a fit, the committee lead brings you in. If it is not, we will tell you that directly rather than leaving you waiting.

Volunteers are not paid, and neither is anyone else here. Parents for Transparency takes no district money and no candidate money, which is what lets it say what it says.