Suzie R. Swartz
School Board (SVUSD) · Trustee Area 3President
Controls: your K-12 public schools.
Civio maps government as seen from Lake Forest, California. Districted seats like this one cover part of the city — enter your address to see the exact roster that governs you. Your address never leaves your device.
1What can this job do?
Your local school board governs the K-12 public schools in the Saddleback Valley Unified School District. The five-member board approves the district budget, hires and evaluates the superintendent who actually runs the schools, sets attendance boundaries (which school your kids go to), and adopts district policies and the curriculum the state allows. These are the people who decide most of what happens inside your neighborhood public schools.
It does NOT run colleges (a separate community-college board does), set California's education laws or academic standards (the state does), or control what an individual teacher says in a single classroom. It cannot raise taxes on its own — only voters can approve a school or .
2What has this person done with it?
We don't yet track a record of this official's actions here. For local offices, the public record lives in the body's own minutes, agendas, and recorded votes — published on its official website — and in the Orange County Registrar of Voters' . Those are the primary sources to check; we'd rather say "we don't know yet" than summarize selectively.
We only log matters of public record, in the same format for every official — never opinion or news coverage.
3How does this affect you?
This is the one school board member your elects to the Saddleback Valley Unified School District board. You vote for this single seat, but the whole five-member board sets the rules for the K-12 public schools your kids go to here, including budgets, school boundaries, and district policy. So you pick one , and that trustee is one of the five voices deciding for all the local public schools.
4How do you change it?
This is an elected seat with a four-year term. Saddleback Valley elects by trustee area, so you vote for the one board member from your area. The next regular school board election is on the November 2028 ballot. Registration, your polling place, and mail-ballot requests all run through the Orange County Registrar of Voters (ocvote.gov). School board races are short, local, and easy to miss — a good one to set a reminder for.
This seat is expected on the ballot November 7, 2028 — that's the county's forecast, not yet the official notice of election.