Taking experience and turning it into action
As a candidate for the school committee I have been asked a wide range of questions and I’ve used my experience and background in state government and nonprofit leadership to address them. As a staff member in the MA Senate for more than 10 years, I have worked closely with school committees, city councils, mayors and select boards to achieve the goals they have and to identify solutions.
Our budget has been the most common question I’ve talked about with people at their doors and I explained some of my thoughts last week on how we need to set out to identify cost drivers and examine what solutions we can improve in our own programs that would not only serve families better but also address some of our budget growth.
I’ve also heard a significant amount about how our school infrastructure is not keeping pace with the modern educational needs of our students. We have some buildings that are over 100 years old and a growing student population. As technology increasingly plays a role in the classroom and people see tech focused careers as some of the best fields for our next generation, we need to keep pace. As a member of the committee I’ll be advocating for and working to continually update a capital needs plan that is integrated with the City’s capital needs planning. We need to identify the useful life of our assets and develop models for replacement and upgrade to meet all these concerns.
I also hear a lot about communication. We can and will do more to communicate where we are headed. For example, the district needs to take important meeting materials like the school budget process and boil it down to a simple narrative document each year that can be posted on the school website and distributed to families in the district. No one should have to rely on finding the right meeting agenda to link to the right documents.
We also need to explain how we got to where we are - bring it into a form that can be posted on the school website. People should be able to easily learn information about how our override money was implemented, how the pandemic impacted our programming and finances, and how our current budget is functioning. And, by continuously listening to our community we will also know more questions we need to answer with clarity.
In addition, we need to improve on our own internal data reporting and discussion at the school committee. It is hard to solve systemic problems if we are not identifying and reporting the information in a systematic way. Whether it is questions raised on disproportionate student discipline or trends in student populations, we can develop more than the state required data (info we probably already have) and build our knowledge base on the issues we are facing and how to solve them.
Asking the right questions is the starting point for good public policy, something I’ve honed my skills at for the past decade. I think my experience working in the spotlight of public scrutiny prepares me for the role ahead and the challenges we face. We have many things in common even when it doesn’t seem like it; I’ve worked directly with diverse coalitions to achieve success and it is exactly what I hope to do with the support of your vote on November 7!
