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.
Relative to other candidates, you’re somewhat new to Newton. What led you to run for school committee?
I have been a passionate advocate for equitable education for quite some time. We are relatively new to Newton, having moved here two years ago. In that time, I joined the Cabot Council, serving as chair for one year, and the board at Temple Shalom here in Newton, but previously I’d been deeply involved in a number of education-based initiatives. In every room I’m in, I’m thinking about how can we improve educational outcomes?
What led to that interest in education, since you’re not a teacher?
I studied computer engineering in college, and then was more on the tech and computer side.Then I worked in finance and strategy roles at Proctor and Gamble for 13 years. I started to get involved in some education initiatives where we were living. I was the head of finance for Charmin, and was also doing volunteer activities in the evening and sitting on boards, and thought I can’t really merge my day job and my night job anymore. So I left to pursue the education space both professionally and as a volunteer. Our educators, professors, teachers, work in that area, so I think it’s something I really grew up in.
I see the impact that education can have on a community, before [children] even get into kindergarten, what are we doing to prepare them? That trickles forward through everything else.
You said that you’re passionate about equitable education. What’s your interpretation of that phrase?
It’s: Are we delivering services that meet the needs of every student that’s in our door, whether they need some extra help getting through the curriculum, or whether they need advancement and to be pushed further? It’s a focus on giving students what they need to be successful and making sure that we’re moving any barriers that might be in the way systemically, institutionally, that could prevent them from achieving those educational outcomes. I think the superintendent and most of the School Committee members would say the same thing.
Drawing on your personal views and experience, what incremental interpretation would you put on giving every student what they need?
I think we’re relatively new to the level of data that some other institutions and other school districts have had across the country. Superintendent Nolin has been really great, and I know she’s passionate about this topic, but in the past public schools haven’t necessarily had the individual student data to understand where they currently are and where they need to be. We might have annual testing with MCAS, but that really is not giving teachers the educational information that they need to be giving those students what they need to succeed. With more tools available now, we’re able to see where students are rating on different levels and different aspects of reading, math, and do more tailored education. Then when we roll that up systemwide, we can better understand trends in a more frequent way than we have in the past.
How would your being on the School Committee further that goal versus someone else?
One, my deep experience working in education initiatives. I’m the co-founder of an education technology startup that helps school districts hear from their community by reaching out through rapid text message surveys. Through that experience, I’ve worked with hundreds of school districts across the country and gotten to see some things that are working really well, and some things that are not. Some of that perspective and experience will be really helpful.
The other side is my financial background. I have a lot of experience in managing budgets. I sat on a school district’s finance and audit committee for five years, so I have a good understanding of how school districts are operating.
What works well versus not well in data analyses that you’ve observed, and how does that apply to Newton going forward?
One is the newness. We’re relatively new in doing these measurements, and I think with that comes a lot of training needs across the board, making sure that everyone throughout the organization, from the individual classroom level, to the building level, to the school district level and School committee is understanding what data we have, what it comes from, and how it can be used to help evaluate. The flip side is that as we move more towards database decision making, which I’m a big fan of, we need to make sure that people’s experiences aren’t lost in those discussions, because data can only tell us one side of the story. We need to make sure that we’re elevating parent and student voices as we’re going through these decisions, as well.
I’m a parent, we often email the kids’ teachers. There’s thousands of pages of information about NPS online. There’s a lot of avenues to be heard. How, relative to today, how do parents and student voices get elevated?
Right now, we often hear from the loudest voices and people who might be really concerned about a particular issue. I’m not sure that we’re hearing from a wide swath of the community. There might be good communication between the teacher and the individual parents, but is that getting aggregated up to really understand what parent experience is across schools? You can use more data or surveying to be able to get that input.
The other side is students. I want to make sure that we’re really hearing from student voices as well. Superintendent Nolin has done some outreach to reach out to students to hear them. The School Committee and Superintendent visit every school, which is a wonderful initiative, and I’ve been able to go to the ones that have it. But my schedule allowed for that, because I work remotely and currently work for myself. A lot of working parents can’t just take the morning off to go to the school at 8:30 in the morning and hear from the School Committee and engage in that way. We need to be really thoughtful in what we ask of parents in their engagement with the school. Should some of those meetings be in the evening? Evening doesn’t work for everybody, but the morning certainly doesn’t work for a lot of working parents.
Which issues or concerns do you think are being over-communicated by what you call the loudest voices?
One that we’ve been hearing, very loudly on one side, is leveling and multi-level classrooms. From what I have seen, the data is supporting that multilevel classrooms in the high schools have not been successful, and that we should be evaluating options to return to a more leveled system. But we’re hearing from a segment of the population, and I want to make sure that when making decisions, we’re trying to hear well rounded input from people who may be satisfied with the current system as well.
If you’re on the School Committee, how would you do that differently from how it’s done now? A lot of hours, consultants, and superintendent reports have already been spent on the various angles of that issue.
Are we outreaching to people in multiple ways, to those that might not be in the rooms, or might not feel like they can speak comfortably? It takes a lot of self-advocacy to show up to a School Committee meeting and speak on a particular issue. Generally, you hear the counter-status-quo. You’re not going to have people say, “Hey, what you’re currently doing is super awesome and you should just keep doing that.” People don’t come to public comment to do that. When you’re hearing one side consistently, it’s good governance to be outreaching and seeing if there’s another side to this issue.
What is your view on the multilevel issue?
From what I have seen at the high school level, it has not been successful, and that we need to explore other options.
How did you experience the teacher strike, having moved to Newton only 2 years ago?
The teachers strike was our first year in Newton, which was a tough way to be introduced to the school system. It started even before the strike. There was a work-to-rule program going on, so we didn’t know what necessarily was the norm for some of our teacher or staff interactions. The strike itself was extraordinarily hard on my family, personally, and I know that that’s similar to most people who had kids in NPS during that time, especially on the younger side. I think that parents are still traumatized from the COVID years, and revisiting having our kids out of school for some indeterminate amount of time, brought up a lot of personal stress for many people. I think it broke a lot of trust between the community, parents, and the schools, and I think we have a long way to go as a community to rebuild some of that.
Moving forward, I would do everything possible to be in a better position to not have a strike. I think the major focus is how are we building those relationships? How are we making sure that we have financial and community support for the schools so that we don’t get into the same situation the next time?
Just before the strike, the NTA and the City were many millions of dollars apart in their positions. That seems like a math problem, not a relationship problem.
Part of the trust problem was that the two sides didn’t believe the other was genuine, and that they weren’t coming to the table in a manner that felt like, from an outsider’s point of view, that they believed what the other side was saying. One side didn’t seem to believe that what the other was asking for was genuine, or that what’s called a budget limitation is truly a limitation. I do believe a lot of the problems come back to making sure that we have financial support for the school district, and there’s limited resources with extremely increasing costs. It’s a hard, hard problem to solve when your pool of funds doesn’t cover everything that you need to do.
How would you approach that problem?
Every year we need to be sure that we’re going through the budget in great detail, understanding what flexibility there is within it. In most school districts, including Newton’s, the vast majority of the budget is salaries, and those are challenging to do anything about. We don’t want to be increasing class sizes. We want to support our students in that way. We need to understand what within the budget is discretionary, what’s variable, that we can have influence on. So good budgeting principles is step number one.
Step two is working with the City to be making sure that we’re able to support the schools that we all want to have.
Step three is understanding if we need more funding for our schools, and what does that mean for a future override? I don’t think that’s in the next year or two, so we need some shorter-term things to bridge.
Going back to data, and now discussing your role at Possip, how specifically does your background relate to budgeting? (Note: Possip is an educational technology company that Ms. Fisher’s campaign website states she founded.)
I’ve always been a data person, whether it’s studying engineering in college, or working in the corporate world on the finance side. I list as one of my hobbies Excel, so I’m super passionate about digging into numbers, understanding trends, and sharing that data in a way that makes sense. I’m currently a consultant helping nonprofits building financial models and plans, and really understanding their data to build a path forward that helps them sustain their mission.
My experience with Possip helped me understand how you can turn qualitative experiences into data and trends, and understand what your community cares about.
My experience there has also taught me that opinions and experiences can really vary within the same community. We often ask parents a question that I think has a clear answer, and we’d get something that was surprising. Or we’d get pockets of answers where it looked like the total data said the community felt one way, but when we dug in, it was really pockets of people who were polarized on either side. When you’re working with data day-in/day-out, you’re able to understand that it’s not the first number you see that matters. You have to ask four or five questions and get to that next level of understanding. I work with that every day, so could bring a lot to the School Committee.
What are the current data trends in NPS?
One of the top trends in our data is parents care a lot about two things. At the beginning of the school year, it’s communication. When am I dropping my kid off, when am I picking them up? Who’s their teacher? What do I need to bring to school? The second is car line. So people have to wait a long time to pick up their kids. Is that an efficient process? How is my kid getting to and from school? People are surprisingly passionate about that.
Within Newton, I think people don’t necessarily know we haven’t recovered from COVID in terms of our attendance rates. Chronic absenteeism is a problem that’s happening nationally. I know from the Cabot Council, we tackled that as a committee this past year, looking into some of the trends. Often parents don’t necessarily know that their kid missing two days a month makes them chronically absent for the year, and that has significant educational impacts. It’s an issue that I don’t necessarily see at the forefront, but is there in the data.
What are your thoughts on the full-time attendance officer that NPS recently hired?
It’s a nuanced issue. We tell people to not send their kids to school when they might be contagious with things. That sort of comfort level of what we send our kids to school with, in terms of illness, has dramatically changed the last five years. We need to understand what are the drivers of attendance? What are the barriers, and what systems can we be putting in place to get more kids in seats every single day?
On the theme of data and surveys, as a School Committee member, what’s your process for deciding whether you should act on what you’re seeing in survey results, if that conflicts with what you believe are educational best practices, or if it’s just not the right thing to do?
We have to be aware of the role of the School Committee, and that it’s not involved in operations or curriculum decisions. The Committee does have oversight of the Superintendent, who has responsibilities for outcomes. We don’t want the School Committee be very directive in “how’s” of what the district does. For decision making, I think that it is always a mix of research, data, and people. If the data and research are really saying something different than the community is, I think we have a responsibility to educate the community. As parents, we all went through school, so we feel in some ways like we’re experts. But that was for most of us a fairly long time ago, and the research has changed. We gravitate to what we know and what we’ve experienced, and sometimes that’s where education and the School Committee need to play a role.
The other side is constituent services. Sometimes it may not be a broad community issue, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter to an individual family. I see another important role of the School Committee as elevating those experiences as well and troubleshooting.
In this interview and in your campaign, you’ve referenced your data and technology background in equity and inclusion. In the past year, NPS has eliminated the word equity from its motto. The previous office of DEI has now been merged into HR, and based on public descriptions, most of its student-facing responsibilities have been taken away. Do you agree with those changes? And what do you see as the role of DEI going forward, if you were on the School Committee?
The reality is we live in a diverse world, and we need to make sure that our students are prepared to live, interact, and work in that world. So whatever words we use, we need to be helping everyone who goes through our schools have tools to help navigate that. There’s lots of ways that that can be done, but it all comes back to recognizing that we all have differences, have different walks of life, and making sure that as we’re going forward, we’re removing as many of those barriers as possible, so that we have more similar walks of life.
Does having more similar walks of life mean you advocate for students having equal outcomes?
Yes, I think it’s about that. Removing barriers so that every student is achieving what they need to be achieving, and that we’re focused on student outcomes as our center for decision making. It’s not about every student getting exactly the same thing, since not every student comes to us with the same things. And so some students may need a different set of tools to be able to enable them to have the same access to education that their fellow students have.
Being relatively new to Newton, what insights or different perspective would you bring tothe School Committee?
I’ve lived through a different school system with my kids, in a very different type of education environment. We went to our neighborhood public school in Cincinnati, and it was a very different experience than public school here. The experience of having seen school districts across the country is also important to bring outside perspective on how our different states and school districts handle things. There’s a lot of similarities and a lot of areas where we’re different as well.
How is Newton different from the prior school district your family was in?
We have had a wonderful experience here, even starting in a year where there was a teacher strike. We’ve been very happy with our students’ experience here. The first thing is that they are more student-centered than where we were; before it felt like it was more of a monolithic of “we need to get all the students through.” It was also more of a competitive environment, and we’ve been happily surprised that Newton is a bit less individually competitive than where we were.
Over the past couple of years of watching or observing the School Committee, did you see anything that caused you to say to yourself, “I would have done that differently”?
I think – and I’m sure everybody involved would probably say – the teachers strike and what led up to it. I have to imagine that those involved would try to do whatever they could to not end up in that same spot. That’s one area that I would really work towards making sure that, when we head into a collective bargaining situation, that we don’t end up in the same place.
The other is making sure that we’re thinking about working families when doing engagement with the community, and offering some different opportunities like evenings, midday, some mornings.
Is there anything you’d like to share that we didn’t get to?
I’d love to talk about some of the other educational initiatives that I’ve been a part of. one in particular that expanded preschool access across Cincinnati. We worked with the community to get a tax override approved, and then worked with local preschool and daycare providers, as well as the school district, to expand access to quality preschool for three- and four-year-olds across the city. Every year now, we’re educating an extra 2,000-3,000 students who weren’t getting that access previously. We’re seeing those results in third grade reading and beyond. It’s an initiative that I’m really happy and proud to have been a part of, but speaks to the breadth and depth of experience I’ve had being part of education based initiatives over the last 10 years.
