Ed. Note: During August, Fig City News conducted interviews with each of the 10 School Committee candidates who are running in competitive elections. This notice was sent to all candidates prior to the interviews. All interviews were completed before any were published.
Your biography shows experience in education, theater, and currently work in schools. Can you walk through your background?
The last several years since COVID, and with my third child, I’ve been working in schools, and the last few years as a tutor for newcomer English learners at Watertown Middle School. Also as a substitute teacher, sometimes both as day sub, or a long-term sub, depending on needs at the time. Before that, I was working at Memorial Spaulding in early literacy interventions for a couple of years. Prior to COVID upending the art scene, I was working in the performing arts, doing a combination of performing, directing, producing, and arts administration for about 15 years.
Which theater were you working with?
I worked for a lot of different theaters. I did freelance. I worked with the Central Square Theater and Boston Playwrights at the Boston Center for the Arts. And then I ran a chamber opera company opera hub for several years.
Regarding literacy intervention, we’ve covered the issues around the literacy curriculum, and on your campaign website one of your priorities is literacy. Could you talk about your experiences at Memorial-Spaulding, where Fontas & Pinnell curriculum has a history? Why is literacy an issue in your campaign?
I’m glad that the district has moved towards the EL curriculum for its literacy curriculum. It has more grounding in making sure that students are exposed to a level academic vocabulary that will help them learn to decode. Their oral comprehension will be stronger.The district also has been moving towards stronger modes of helping students decode.
One of the ways that I’ve seen that happen is that some of the funds for the intensive interventions under the bucket of the MTSS framework this past year went to the Underwood School, where my kids go, and I understand from my work on the School Parent Council there that the literacy specialist was able to implement some intensive phonics interventions for children who, in the first half of the school year, were exhibiting signs they weren’t keeping pace with understanding concepts in the first and second grade curriculum. The specialist was able to use some of those funds and establish these six to 12 week interventions so that kids got an intensive phonics instruction that helped them rejoin the pace of the normal curriculum. They actually got through the entire phonics curriculum, for the first time in 10 years. Another is that they were able to move the assessment scores from the beginning of the year. There were maybe 70% of kids reading at the expected decoding level. They were aiming for the gold standard benchmark of 80% by the end of the year, and they made it all the way to 92% of students reading at benchmark by the end of the year. 95% is sort of the max in terms of all students that you could expect. It was a very effective set of interventions, and one that they’re looking to expand through the MTSS process to all the elementary schools.
So are things generally on the right track?
They are on right track and I think we need to make sure that the budget is set up to support the expansion.
School Committee members have talked about the role of the School Committee in terms of governance and goal setting, and how by contrast operations are handled by the Superintendent down. You displayed some knowledge of operations. Would your efforts better be directed at the building level as a full-time educator, working full time as opposed to going on the School Committee?
That is a fascinating question, I”m not sure they’re entirely mutually exclusive. I haven’t been working in the Newton district, and I certainly wouldn’t attempt to work in Newton were I to work [full time] in education. That could be a conflict of interest. But that’s something voters will decide on some level, in a couple of months. I think that the knowledge of the operations can support understanding how our budgeting is prioritizing different parts of the operations, which is a fundamental role of the School Committee, as well as the evaluation of the Superintendent, which is also one of the fundamental roles of the School Committee.
You just mentioned the evaluation of the Superintendent. That’s on your campaign website as something you would lean into. What were your views on the evaluation that Anna Nolin received this past June?
It was generally positive, which I would agree with. She’s identified a lot of the areas of strength in the district, and the areas where we have room for improvement, accurately in terms of what I, and other parents that I’ve talked to, expect. One area that seemed like it needs work is communication with some of the special education parents. I would also be looking at the strategic plan that was laid out and asking “Are you meeting the goals that were laid out? How are we moving in the directions that you’ve identified at the needed pace?”
On communication with families receiving special services, there’s an Office of Special Services, a whole central administration wing devoted to that communication. There’s the SEPAC, which is a statutory required entity that gets an audience in front of the School Committee every year, as well as devoted meetings. It seems like there’s already a lot of communication. What more do you think is needed?
I’ve heard from those families that understanding what types of services and programs are available is something that not enough families have immediate access to. There are many families who are very well informed, and who go to the SEPAC meetings, who are in the mix on those things, and then, in general, sometimes it’s been hard for families to find the information they need to figure out which services that the district offers would best be best suited to their children.
Communication, not just for special services, but across the board has been a recurring theme on many candidates‘ platforms. I’m an NPS parent. I get more ParentSquare messages than I can read. I can barely keep up with the communication, so is more the answer? How do you feel communication could be improved?
What I found in our parent community is that yes, parents are kind of bombarded with things and thinking through which things do I actually need to pay attention to, and which things are fundamental to understanding our financial situation are the most valuable. And one of the things I’ve found in the last couple of years is that there are many parents and other community members, but especially parents who’ve moved here within the last 10 years, who do not understand the parameters of Proposition 2.5, for example, that it doesn’t exist in other states or other countries., It’s not a mode of interacting with the government that is familiar to many people, and the constraints that puts on our budget. I’ve been able to help people understand that in a better way.
In addition to some of the other financial constraints on our budget, whether it’s the pensions or the fact that we’re paying a lot of maintenance into building projects, how those are all interacting to make it a time of significant physical constraints for our whole City budget, not just the schools, is something that I feel like I’ve been able to communicate effectively with people who didn’t understand it before.
I’ll ask the same question we asked Chris Brezski recently. There’s a lot of needs, everything costs a lot of money, and there’s not infinite funding. What’s your solution?
I think there are a few different things that we can tweak. I agree with Chris Breski that we can try to smooth out the pensions a little bit, and that would take strain off of the budget in the next few years. Given that we are paying for costs that didn’t exist in previous generations or that weren’t being paid into in previous generations, we need to decide, are we going to pay in more through an override in order to access the same level of services that we’ve had in the past, and pin down the pensions and investing buildings, or are we going to make cuts? That’s a fundamental set of choices that the City is going to have to face in the next couple of years.
One of your priorities is crunching the numbers. Having crunched the existing numbers, where do you fall on those trade-offs?
Somebody asked me the other day if you had to prioritize the MTSS interventions versus class size, which would you pick? I would pick the MTSS interventions because if you don’t get some of those fundamental skills down, it doesn’t really matter what size class you have. It’ll never be small enough if you don’t have some of the fundamental literacy, numeracy and executive functioning skills that those services and those interventions are designed to establish.
You talk about your experience as a parent volunteer: creative arts & sciences (CAS), and being on the parent council. What’s been your experience as a parent?
It’s been such a strange time. Coming out of COVID is when we came into the schools. We were in Boston for 10 years before moving to Newton four and a half years ago. A lot of it has been just rebuilding the experience for everyone. That’s one of the things that I’ve tried to focus on through my work with the PTO on making sure that we bring back CAS or the Science Fair. I see teachers working towards rebuilding student social and academic skills and trying to figure out which kids miss which things. That’s been a major challenge for teachers, parents, and students for the last several years, that everybody’s still working on.
The PTO equity policies over the past several years have been debated. PTO officers think they’re a pain to administer. What are your views on how PTOs relate to NPS going forward?
I think one of the things that has been frustrating for some of the schools is that you’re not allowed to pay into some things because of the equity policies, even when other schools have them already, because they’ve already done it through their renovations. When we had the heat wave last year, there was a school where parents wanted to get fans for their old building. And the initial reaction was they couldn’t because of the equity policy, because it would be building equipment. There are schools that have fully functioning air conditioning. There is a mismatch there that we need to work through in terms of what does equity mean in terms of funding and what students actually have access to on a day-to-day basis?
In the Creative Arts and Sciences area, which the PTOs fund, I would like to see more collaboration between schools to make sure that students across the district are having similar experiences, and also that we’re engaging the presenters in a way that is financially efficient.
You have an interesting perspective on the teacher’s strike because you’re a parent with some educator experience in the buildings, but you’re not in the union. How did you experience the strike?
I totally understand why teachers wanted to get paid more. I understand that we as a society have not dealt with parental leave in major ways, and that these are things that we need to be figuring out for all of our employees, not just our teachers.For instance, the custodians union’s pay has been pretty stagnant as well. One of the unfortunate outcomes of the strike is that it divided the parent community, because there was so much uncertainty. For some families, it felt very traumatic. I think it made it hard for people to talk about how we’re going to fund these things. Most of the parents I knew just got through this strike as best they could, and then they had no bandwidth to talk about anything political in the city for the rest of the school year, and they didn’t start to engage with the municipal budget issues again until this past spring. It was definitely an intense budget discussion, but it wasn’t the sort of intense uncertainty that the strike engendered in day-to-day family operations. I mostly want to get to a point where we can talk about how we’re going to fund and what our priorities as a City really are.
You mentioned parental leave. As a parent of three kids in elementary school, we’ve never had a year where one of their teachers didn’t miss a lot of time on parental leave. How would you explain to a voter why we might need more parental leave?
Our whole society is moving towards women working more during their child-bearing years. Our economy basically depends on that right now. Certainly in Massachusetts. And if we can’t figure out parent leave, then we are not going to have the number of people employed that we currently do. We are feeling it as a benefit that we’re giving teachers, but I think it’s really a fundamental question for our economy of who’s watching the kids? Who’s having the kids? What are we expecting of people who are having children? I see that we need people in that age to work in our modern economy, and at the same time, we need to provide enough time for people to have children. And we need to figure out the substitute situation. I think the long-term substitution is very chaotic in Newton at the moment. We need to figure out the funding stream for that.
If you’re on the School Committee, how do you prevent another strike going forward?
I think one of the things that Dr. Nolin has done well is to re-engage in communications with the union. outside of collective bargaining. It seems like there had been a real lack of communication between previous district leadership and the union, and having good relations leading up to negotiations can help them go better. We need to work earlier to figure out what the funding will look like, what class size might look like, and set up those expectations within the budget controls that we have.
The NPS DEI office has been downsized, folded into the HR Department, and the responsibilities of the DEI director, at least based on public memos, have been re-oriented to a staff engagement role. Do you agree with that, and how do you see that role going forward?
I know that they’ve been restructuring a lot of the senior staff and I trust [Dr. Nolin’s] judgement in terms of how the staff is most effectively organized. For me, what I would be looking for in a DEI program being effective in terms of evaluating that, is that the district staff are acknowledging just how much difference there is in Newton families and kids in the schools. We have 60+ plus first languages that are spoken, and all of those home cultures that are represented. Also there are multiple English-speaking home cultures. In terms of equity, one of the best things we can do is to make sure that the foundational skills of literacy, numeracy, and executive functioning are there for all kids so that they can move on to learn whatever it is that they want to learn, in an environment that is inclusive of all of those home traditions, where students feel like their particular home culture is welcome, where neurodivergence is welcome, where there’s ways that we ensure we’re including what kids bring to the table in the classroom environment at the same time as providing essential skills.
Absenteeism has been an issue raised by Dr. Nolin. To the point you just raised, many Newton families are international. Anecdotally, one of the issues that raises is that many families take school days off to travel abroad. How would you consider that when thinking through attendance policies?
Balancing inclusivity, with things like attendance and achievement, is where the rubber hits the road on thinking through what you just raised, which is Newton is a very international city. This is something that I’ve definitely noticed, it’s something that we haven’t necessarily had to deal with before, because in one sense the public schools across the country were largely established to include immigrant families and historically, that’s been something that we’ve done. Travel has never been easier. So this is something that is a relatively new phenomenon in terms of people traveling globally during the school year.
One of the things I talk about with people is that there is a lot of material that is cumulative in the schools, that if we’re trying to teach things systematically, time out of the school might have a different impact than you expect. I think we need to make the case that we are offering something that is cumulative. At the same time, the district only has so much control over what families choose to do. We’re never going to kick families out because they miss a week of school.
You’re an Underwood parent. You referenced building infrastructure as one of the budget inputs. If the current setup of Ward and Underwood cannot continue indefinitely, what would you like to see in the future?
I’m coming at this from a slightly different perspective, which is that we had a plan from 2011 for redoing buildings across the city. And it’s been 15 years, and we’ve made a lot of progress, with some great new buildings. At this point, our financial situation and our enrollment patterns have changed a bit. It’s worth not only talking about Underwood and Ward, but also taking a step back and saying whatever we decide there is probably going to have repercussions for some of the other school buildings that are like down the list from us. What do we want to see in the next 15 years across the city in terms of school renovations, consolidations, walkability, and location-based school districting? Depending on what we decide with Underwood and Ward, there are several options that could make financial sense for the city.
Is there anything you observed the current or prior School Committees do and you said to yourself I might have done that differently?
It’s not like something that’s happened at any one meeting, but I would like us to start to talk about the school budget, not just in crisis moments. We get to March, and suddenly there’s an emergency, and so we should flesh out the priorities before that. Then there’s the moving back and forth between the community, School Committee, district, Mayor, and the other players.
Is there anything about your candidacy you’d like to convey that we didn’t cover?
Yes. For so many of the people that I’ve talked to, the presence of a quality school system in Newton is very central to the identity of the city. It’s why many, many people have moved here over decades. I even talked to one woman the other day whose great-grandparents moved here for the schools 100 years ago. I think we should be working towards maintaining that as a city, and that’s one of the central things I’d want to do on the School Committee.
