When the Cobb County Board of Education approved $12 million for ultraviolet lights and hand-rinsing machines in the Cobb School District in December 2020, Stacy Efrat had seen enough. It was time to act.
Efrat, a parent of three children in the school district who works in banking, said she had always paid close attention to what was happening in her local schools, but not what went down at the district level.
That was probably the case with most parents, Efrat said, until the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Everybody’s wondering, what are the COVID policies, what do they need to be, are our kids safe at school?” she said.
To get answers, in the fall of 2020, Efrat began watching school board meetings online.
“I was really blown away by the dysfunction on the board and the behavior of the board, and (seeing) what I would call the reckless spending of the board,” Efrat said.
It turned out that other parents had also begun keeping tabs on the school board’s activities. In a Facebook group of fellow Cobb parents, Efrat put out a message along the lines of: “I’m doing something about this. Who’s in?”
Two more moms – Heather Tolley-Bauer, a stand-up comedian, and Jessica Bergeron, a special education expert – messaged Efrat they were.
Kris Hale, a retired teacher in Fulton County schools who now trains dogs, was also paying closer attention to the board’s activities since COVID hit. She texted Efrat separately and became the fourth founding member of what would become Watching the Funds-Cobb, one of the school district’s most vocal and visible watchdog groups.
COVID beginnings
In Tolley-Bauer’s east Cobb home, she sat with Efrat, Hale and Laura Judge, who joined Watching the Funds-Cobb a year after the group got going in January 2021, when her children were both still in elementary school.
For Judge, who has a background in bioscience…
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