"I'm one of the few people who have actually tried to read our entire district budget. It took me two weeks to get through the whole thing and actually talk to enough people to understand what all the lines in that budget meant, and what all the numbers were. And I think that's a problem."
"The decisions that are made and encoded in the budget actually are the hard decisions that are most important. And it's really important that everyone understands them so they're involved in the decision-making, (and) so they trust the organization."
Colohan left his job as an engineer at Google to become a stay-at-home dad eight years ago. He joined the Duveneck Elementary School PTA board as treasurer and made the budget presentation the most fun part of the meeting, he said. Colohan dressed up as the school mascot, Duvey the Dragon, and danced around for the kids, he said.
Colohan has since worked at all 17 schools, from kindergarten to twelfth grade, mostly focused on math and music. Colohan said he was concerned to teach eighth-grade algebra when students were supposed to be learning how to factor. But one of the students didn't know six times seven and had to Google the answer he should've learned in elementary school.
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