The Daily is conducting interviews with Medford School Committee candidates ahead of the municipal election on Nov. 4 where residents will be able to choose up to six candidates. This story will be updated with additional interviews as they are completed. All interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Tufts Daily (TD): What’s your motivation for running for School Committee? What makes you unique as a candidate? What are some goals you have going into the committee?
Jessica Parks (PD): My biggest motivation is my son. Everything I do is for him — and obviously all his friends. My background is in urban planning, and I think it’s important to be involved in your community. I bring him to meetings so he can see that it's important to stay involved in your community, and understand what’s going on as part of that. … When there were teacher cuts at the Missituk two years ago, he was at one of the School Committee meetings and he decided to stand up and speak out. I was telling him to sit down — I was like, ‘I don't think it's appropriate to speak at these meetings.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Well, then why do you bring me here?’ To be honest, I think he kind of schooled me and made me remember: exactly, we should be standing up for our community. We should be speaking out. We should be using our voice and that's [what]drives me. … Since then, I’ve continued to advocate for the Missituk teachers, I worked on the override campaign and I also took up the after school work. We have a [real] lack of after-school programming for kids in Medford.
Lisa Kingsley (LK): I have three children in Medford Public Schools. While so much about their experience [has] been fantastic, there’s been some themes and areas [where] I know we, as a district, can continue to grow. I have spent 20 years in public education, including 10 leading at a district level. For the last three years, I’ve been getting my doctorate in education leadership at Harvard, which really focused on having a systems lens. Whenever I saw a consistent pattern emerge within the school district, I would immediately turn on my ‘systems brain’ and wonder, ‘Why does the same frustrating thing keep happening?’ … There [are] consistent areas [where] we can continue to do better as a district. … There is not one school district I care about more than the one that my three kids attend, it felt like the right time [to run].
…I think [it’s] a really important thing for districts to prioritize, putting students at the center of education and decision-making. But what’s really important is that the district has to have a clear vision of what they think good teaching and learning looks like. … One of my main goals is helping us define and codify a clear vision of excellent instruction and making sure we have a strategy for how to get there — for how to honestly look [at] where we are now and [determine] how to move towards whatever our vision is. That [process] would likely [happen] through a strategic plan, but it’s also really going to be through hiring a superintendent [who] matches the vision of what we’re looking for.
Michael Mastrobuoni (MM): My wife and I moved to Medford a few years ago, and one of the coolest things that happened to us was when my son started kindergarten, our world became the schools. My son’s friends became his friends from school. … Part of moving from Somerville to Medford was trying to figure out how I can help my city. I’ve done that through a number of ways: volunteer [Parent-Teacher Organization] events, I’m on the Water and Sewer Commission and I’ve been trying to figure out what’s the best role for me with my skill set.
What makes me unique as a candidate is my municipal finance experience. … In my day job, I’m the budget director for the City of Somerville, and I want to use the skills I’ve learned, whether that’s fiscal management, whether that’s strategic planning, executive leadership, budgeting and school buildings.
The first thing that we’re going to do is hire a new permanent superintendent. We have an interim superintendent right now. It’s the most important hire that we have because they’re the ones that take our strategic plan and turn it into action. So that’s the second big thing, is drafting that strategic plan. It’s really, really important for us to know where we want to be as a school district so that we can take steps together. Identifying gaps, investing in things that need improvement.
Paul Ruseau (PR): I have a lot of work that I’m doing and want to keep doing. Very little gets done in just two years. There’s a number of things, such as the new high school that are going to take seven years. … I think I do, for the most part, know the backgrounds of the other candidates, but I’m the only candidate that grew up in poverty, so I bring that perspective to our decision making on the school committee and, believe me, it is needed.
Aaron Olapade (AO): My biggest motivation is the belief in a cause greater than myself. Public education is something that we all should have access to. As someone who grew up in the public education system for the most part, I’ve seen the opportunity that it unveils to students who come from different backgrounds, different lived experiences.
… Medford right now is, I think, on the cusp of reaching about [a] 50% non-white [population], so having representatives and a teaching educational staff that are more mirroring what the general community looks like is incredibly important. … Being able to be a voice to that demographic, as well as just the demographic of public education in general, is incredibly important to me.
Nicole Branley (NB): I’m not done. I want to keep working. My motivation is always the students and the staff. I like to think that I always show up and I listen, and I want the best for the children. I want our community to really have that Mustang pride, and I think it starts with our kids, and I want them to have that Mustang pride to carry with them wherever they go. What makes me unique? Well, I am the only candidate and the only serving member on the committee that went to Medford Public Schools, has worked in Medford Public Schools and works in public education every day. My kids are in Medford Public Schools. I just had one that graduated this year, and my son is a sophomore. So, I can see Medford Public Schools from many different angles, and that is a unique perspective. When you’ve actually worked in the classroom, it gives you an eagle eye on what goes on in a school day in and day out.
Jenny Graham (JG): I’ve been on the committee for six years and — [COVID-19] aside, because that was the beginning of my term — we have been doing a tremendous amount of work to lay a better, more sustainable foundation for the district and to put systems and structures in place and to make changes that will serve kids. We are finally getting to the point where that foundation is starting to allow us to move more quickly to make the kind of changes that I think will improve outcomes for students and overall the experience for students that we provide. I think for me, running for a fourth term is about certainly continuing the work that we’ve been doing since I started on the School Committee, but with some excitement around finally being in a position to start to see us be able to go fast.
John Intoppa (JI): I’m seeking reelection because I’ve been fighting to do this work for almost six years now. ... The work I’ve been doing is supporting students basically my entire professional career, outside of the School Committee, in terms of getting them the life skills that they need.
One [goal] is voter engagement and education. … If people start voting in high school … it can make the world’s difference in forming that habit. …[I’m also] really stressing the importance of art and design education. … There’s still things for you to learn in this world — I feel like some people have a hard time grasping that — and pushing the creativity and everything that our design education brings is great. Advocacy around our nursing staff, as well, morale as well. … We just need to properly staff our nursing and [make] sure that they are properly compensated. We just passed their contract, and it seems like that was a really good start.
Erika Reinfeld (ER): I think there’s a lot more work to be done. … I’ve spent two years building relationships and I really think that we’re in a really good position to make positive change for students and keep things that are working moving forward. … I’m an interdisciplinary STEM educator, I’m a [Medford Public Schools] mom, and I think that the combination of my work in and around education, and public education in particular, and my program management background from being an outreach program manager is a really nice combination that brings an educational perspective, but also really interdisciplinary — that sees things from a variety of perspectives. …I take a really collaborative approach to education, to problem solving, to listening, responding and taking action. So I think my skill set overlaps with many of the other candidates, and it’s also very complementary to the other candidates. … I took on the uneven distribution of students across the elementary schools; we’ve been working to develop a proactive capital plan, budget transparency, after school programs, communication. … On my personal agenda, I am really interested in looking at the academic offerings, particularly at the elementary-school level, to see what we can do to provide even more personalized learning experience for students.
TD: What do you see as the top issues facing the school district right now?
JP: Communication is a big issue, and obviously funding is an overarching issue. For me personally, I think a really big issue is making sure our students stay engaged in Medford schools. I think we lose students to other schools. I think that we have struggled [to meet the needs of] students that have dyslexia — I've seen numerous friends have to send their children to alternative schools [by] fifth grade, when their children's dyslexia [was not being] addressed. I've also heard from people who say that they wish their child could be more challenged in school. So I think on both ends of the spectrum, we could be doing better. Student engagement is critical across the board.
LK: I think that the opportunities we have now are coherent across the district, so included in that is strategic planning, [a] the vision for effective instruction … [and ensuring] everyone across the district is on the same page, including families, is a really important point. … The fact [that] we have an interim superintendent … that, to me, is a pressing need and a priority, and why right now felt like the right time to run. After-school [programming] and special education would be a part of that.
MM: It’s definitely the high school project. We’re going to renovate [or] rebuild that high school. It’s such an opportunity to do something great for the community. Some residents have no idea that that’s happening, and other people are really fired up. It can be a community asset. … I’ve heard a lot about people having anxiety about the uncertainty that’s going on. What does [the] curriculum look like in the future? What do our resources look like in the future? What risks are out there that the federal government might try and influence what we do? Having people on the School Committee that have a really strong foundation … I think that’s the priority, making sure that we’re stable.
PR: One of the top issues is this gigantic unknown about the federal government. Is it an issue, or not an issue? This anxiety that is in public education is intense. If there’s a sudden drop in funding, decisions will have to be made.
… What we do about funding shortfalls has to be informed by how it impacts our low income students. Public schools are not free … and that’s something I’ve been running on for my entire eight years, is finding ways to get everything to be free in public schools. … Chipping away at what it costs just to be a student is the way to go.
AO: Everyone has a different top priority for their respective families. … That can be from financial limitations for student opportunity when it comes to transportation, disability services, college readiness coursework, athletic and arts program access. … A lot of the time, especially in public ed, we as educators and administration, and we as a community are being asked, year to year, to provide the same opportunity to all students with less and less resources and financial support. At a certain point you start … trying to figure out ways that we can support students, not just from a financial standpoint, but from an equity and trust perspective as well, is incredibly important.
… If we’re not able to invest in the community the proper way, the student opportunity continues to go down, even if you have well-intentioned families, staff and just generally active members of the community.
NB: Definitely budget, always budget. Losing funding, possibly federally, but always the budget. I think choosing our next superintendent is definitely going to be a huge transition to how we want to see Medford Public Schools. I want us to really thrive. I think with the [Massachusetts School Building Authority] project going on for a new envisioned [Medford High School], I think that we really need to pick the right person to help bring us through that process, and that we see this project through and that it gets done. I’m really grateful to the committee that they’ve worked so hard on this. … I think the override has been a huge help for us. I think there’s only so much preparation we can do with the funds that we have, unfortunately, so definitely talking with the mayor and working with her and her team to make sure that all of our needs are covered for the schools. We’re the biggest part of the city budget, so it’s important that our needs are met.
JG: I am the chair of the Medford Comprehensive High School Building Committee. We’re the committee that is working on the project to build or rebuild [Medford High School] and that’s going to be a really pivotal amount of work over the next couple of years. It’s so long overdue that every day that we wait is a day that we’re not giving kids the building that they deserve. There’s a lot of motivation … to help the community really be a part of this journey, but also acknowledge that it’s a journey that we want to take as quickly as we can, to save money and to, frankly, just get people in a building that has air conditioning and heat.
The other thing that I think is looming for us all is every day we don’t know exactly what the impact of the changes happening in Washington will be, but it is not getting easier to support students in the face of all this. … Sometimes we have to make really terrible choices and those things weigh on me, like they weigh on everybody, but I also know that is why the community elects people — not just to do the fun things and the things that are planned, but to be there, to be responsible when the unplanned things happen.
JI: I think that there is an engagement problem that we’re having. I know that coaching staff has come to me in terms of engagement. I know that [the Medford Center for Citizenship and Social Responsibility] is a little bit low in terms of volunteers with engagement. There’s a lot of folks [who] are like, “I need to focus on what I’m doing and I need to get through school,” or they’re focusing on things [where] they may need to help their families, may need to help themselves just to stay afloat. … It’s that sense of belonging that people are looking for, but it seems like they just can’t seem to find it. I know that the principal of the high school, Marta Cabral, made the news for doing this program at lunch where people basically have recess at the high school and that helps enrollment in classes, in terms of people actually showing up and feeling wanted. I think that that is a great initiative. … The after-school program is a huge problem for our primary education families. That is something that has been relayed tirelessly about how it’s putting a strain on families and putting a strain on students because of the stress the families are facing.
ER: The shifting federal education and social policy and how it impacts students in cities and towns. … Many of the executive orders and directives coming from agencies seem designed to divide communities, ignore or actively erase lived experiences, and use federal funding for essential services as means of exerting control over what is taught in the schools, rather than giving districts the autonomy they need to make the best decisions for their community. I’m worried about the pitting of parents against teachers, rather than supporting each other, and I’m worried about the physical and emotional safety of already-marginalized students, including immigrants and LGBTQ+ students, and about rewriting history to promote an unbalanced or inaccurate view of the world. … [The] uncertainty of not knowing how things will play out has a destabilizing effect on both the district’s ability to carry out its daily work and the community’s trust in that work. … As a school committee member, it makes for some very tricky decisions around when to speak out and potentially put a target on our backs, and when to just buckle down and do the work quietly so that students affected feel safe and supported. … Personally, I think balance is really important and I just don’t think we’re getting that from the federal government right now.
TD: Generative AI has been a contentious issue facing schools in Medford and around the country. What is your position on how AI should (or shouldn’t) be used in schools and what are your thoughts on the policy currently being considered by the Committee?
JP: I think [the policy being considered] is a good first step. It recognizes that AI is here. It recognizes that we don't have all the answers, and that we need something in place to acknowledge its existence and start to have the discussion, and start to develop a policy and figure out where teachers lie. … Personally, I think [AI] should probably be kept out of our elementary school classrooms. I think that as children get older, [they] can be taught how to use it responsibly … as a research tool, in computer science classes and classes where it’s applicable. … From a purely environmental standpoint — because my background is environmental science — I am not a huge fan of AI so that's something that I struggle with myself.
LK: The pace of change, as we know, is rapid, and trying to set a policy that covers everything [while] things are changing at such a dynamic pace is going to be impossible to do. I think, more so than trying to capture everything in a policy, we need to make some decisions about our guiding principles. … ‘What do we believe AI should look like [in education]?’ … I think we always need to clarify why it’s being used before we decide what tools or how specific we want to be with it, and we have to make sure any use of AI is aligned with this instructional vision and equity goals when we set it up. … We have to make sure that, at all times, whatever policies we decide on, AI is used as a tool to center human judgement, and it always has to be supporting but not replacing the teacher expertise in human decision making. … Leaning into the people that have the expertise to continue to monitor and adapt what we decide will be another important thing, because this is going to change about 20 more times in the next two years.
MM: The core value of the School Committee around AI is that it should be something that can enhance learning, rather than replace learning. And I think that the next few years are going to be a learning experience. Universities really reacted fast to how quickly large language models took over. … I don’t think we can predict what a perfect policy will [look like], but what we need to do is we need to be proactive about identifying risks, understanding where it’s being used and where it’s not being used and where it’s appropriate.
PR: The current policy that we did pass, the first reading, is a good policy. … Generative AI—we can say it’s banned, but we can’t actually ban it, so I think having a set of rules that are clear and enforceable is the way to go.
… I think one of the biggest concerns about AI … is that people are afraid kids are going to stop learning. I think that that is something to be afraid of. … Every kid in middle and high school has a cell phone in their pocket, and if you pretend they don’t have it, you miss the opportunity to help them understand how to use these tools. … [In] the policy proposal we had, [there was a] requirement that you have to include the logs of what you asked [AI] and what were the responses. I think that is an excellent way to say: “We’re trusting you, but we want to see what you did so we know how you got there.”
AO: If you can’t get out of it, you got to get into it. … As much as I recognize the concern and the consideration about ‘how do we properly separate critical thinking skills and actual student understanding of the material with the model and this idea of what AI is going to be and what it currently already is’ I think trying to completely remove it from schools is just not going to happen.
… Now I think we have to really say to our professionals, this is a tool, and it should be treated as that, and we need to emphasize that to students that it’s available but only in certain circumstances. It should not be considered the main form of knowledge creation.
NB: I was really impressed with the policy. There was a lot to it. A lot of it, I have to say, is so new. It’s new to me. I’m not someone that uses AI for anything. I really don’t love the thought of it being in schools for the simple fact that I want [the kids] to make decisions on their own. That’s part of growing up: You need to make a decision on your own. The policy is great and we definitely have to do something, because this is the reality now. AI is a thing, so we have to plan accordingly for it. But I really wish that we could keep in line with kids’ critical thinking. … I think we’re electronically dependent so much now. Obviously, we have to do what we need to to make sure that what school is going to do is pretty much clear across the board, especially for tests and projects and all of those things.
JG: While [generative] AI is a new tool, relatively speaking, the premise of how we make educational decisions doesn’t really change. … ‘Does this assignment include the use of [AI] or not,’ that is a decision that the teacher gets to make and then the students are expected to do the assignment as it’s been laid out. That part is not different. I think there are real, valid concerns about [generative] AI supplanting critical thinking and I think what I have seen so far is that our educators understand that concern and they aren’t interested in using AI to take the place of critical thinking. … The way that you prepare students, in my mind, is you double down on critical thinking because that is the actual skill that we need to be teaching. … As a society, we have to learn how to use this tool and how to weigh the pros and the cons. … I think there’s a lot of opportunity and I think we’re taking a cautious approach, but the right approach, because I don’t think we would be fulfilling our educational mission if we just said ‘we’re not going to allow this’ because then we would have students who would be trying to learn it on their own.
JI: I don’t believe it has a space in our school as a learning tool. I have concerns over the ethics of it, whether that’s the ethics of citing sources properly and crediting people where they’re credited. Also, the climate impacts, the cognitive development impacts that it has. I think that we need to figure out better ways to serve our students, because it seems like our students aren’t getting it. And I think that focusing more on research-based practices, as opposed to something like generative AI, which is inherently a shortcut, is something we need to focus more on. … The concern that I have is … [generative AI tools] are actually not as smart as people think they are, in terms of these learning systems and how they’re flawed and biased. … I trust that our faculty will be responsible and know how to use it. But in my opinion, I don’t even want to open that door, and I don’t want it [to be] something that folks are using on a regular basis to do class assignments.
ER: I was the one who brought the policy to the floor and that really came following the work of an intradistrict task force, so educators and administrators who got together … and surveyed people within Medford Public Schools to find out what their thoughts were on AI and what kind of guidance they would want from this committee, from the administration. …The consensus there was that AI tools are here and we need to address that and recognize that this is happening and give the students, and the teachers, the tools that they need to make sense of it and be prepared for what will happen beyond school. The guidelines themselves were not about promoting or forbidding any use of AI, but were to give educators the tools that they need to make the educational decisions for their own classroom, their own departments, about what would best serve students’ learning. They were really designed to say: If you choose to use these tools, that decision needs to be rooted in understanding of the legal concerns, the equity concerns, the ethical concerns, the environmental concerns, the impact on students’ own personal growth, development and critical thinking skills.
TD: What do you see as the School Committee’s public-facing role in terms of collaborating with teachers, administrators, families and the general public? Note: The School Committee has three main roles, including passing the budget, hiring and evaluating the Superintendent and establishing school policy.
JP: The School Committee’s role is the big picture. The School Committee is concerned with … end results and how the school is doing as a whole. They are focused on [hiring] the superintendent and putting their trust in [that] superintendent and then putting everything else in place [to] … help the school function and help the students within thrive. I think that it’s important for the School Committee to be accessible [and] to interact with teachers on a regular basis, because those policies are impacting the teachers. I think that teachers, from my understanding and from the interactions I’ve had with [them], don’t necessarily feel comfortable or feel that they have a place to be interacting with the School Committee on a regular basis. … I want to change that culture. Having [regular] teacher interactions with the School Committee would be great so that the School Committee understands [teachers’] day-to-day struggles — even if the School Committee is not in charge of [them]. … It's important that [the School Committee] have an understanding of the day-to-day, and with that comes communication and open, honest dialogue between teachers, between students, between families.
LK: The School Committee’s role is not to [directly] collaborate with teachers or administrators. Obviously, we want to talk to any stakeholder [who’s] interested, but the School Committee is part of a partnership, and it [serves as] the governance arm. The School Committee is in charge of governing the district, which [means] setting long-term strategy, making sure that we are setting goals, making sure that we are hiring and supervising the superintendent and making sure that we have appropriate policies that are regularly being reviewed. … The superintendent, [in turn], is in charge of implementation — [for] supervising their team, their district directors [and] teachers. … We always welcome communities’ input, because [it] helps inform our government, but we are not the ones who will be addressing or solving that constituent's problem. We will instead be handing [those] to management and then holding them accountable for [resolving them].
MM: I think one of the most important roles of the School Committee is to be a cheerleader to the district, to share the great things we’re doing, but also to take in feedback from residents. … I think consistency across the district is one thing that’s really, really important for residents. When you move schools, you have to do all of your setup. You have an all new set of apps you gotta get, or you’re looking for things [for] your kids backpack. … The worst thing in the world is for us to create a resource and not have people utilize it, so making sure that we’re being consistent, clear and setting the right expectations for residents so that they know where to go to get the information they need.
PR: I don’t collaborate much with teachers. I do collaborate a lot with administrators and families. … [For] families with students that have unmet needs, I think we are often the people that get contacted. … In our own training for a professional association, we are taught … that the first thing we need to do is send them back to their teacher and then their assistant principal, principal and assistant superintendent.
… I do think school committees have an important public-facing role. I think that knowing what the role limits are, legally, is an important consideration. … The school committee has different rules than the city council and this is a painfully obnoxious point to some people, but school committee meetings are not public meetings. They are meetings in public. … Our meetings are business meetings; we have a set of things we must do. …To a large extent, [our meetings] are not a place for the public to be coming and seeking an audience with us. In my mind, the best place for that is one-on-one with school committee members, who can then take that and get more information, whether it’s from administration or other colleagues, and then bring that to the committee for action.
AO: Education is not something that only schools can do. There has to be some expectation on the parents, guardians, caregivers in the home, on the siblings and the immediate family, the related kinships around the student or child. … I think now as a school committee, that's one of the priorities, we want to encourage the community to be more involved. … Of course, I can’t make changes like that at the macro level, but even at the most notable micro level, how are we supporting families to understand what's going on in the classroom, and then how [are we] supporting our teachers by letting our parents say to them, this is what's happening at home?
TD [for Mastrobuoni]: A big part of your platform is about getting and using school funds to improve Medford schools, especially long-term. What kind of projects do you have in mind, and what is your plan to get funding for them?
MM: I would like to use my experience developing, communicating, sharing budgets from my day job to support the work of Medford. … That could look like multi-year budgeting, where we take where we’re at right now and try to identify risks two or three years down the road. That could look like how we interact with our union partners, our teachers, our paraprofessionals, our administrators … to chart a course rather than being responsive to whatever issue of the day is coming up.
NB: I’m elected to serve the whole community. … Everything that goes on in the city affects our students, it affects their families. … I feel like what happens within our schools goes into our streets and into our community. We want [the students] to be successful adults. I’m always here to listen. I think it’s important that we have conversations with City Hall, that we’re advocating for our kids and their needs and their family’s needs, because it takes a village to raise a child. We all need to be good listeners and come to City Hall with our community’s concerns or ideas, whether they’re positive or negative. I don’t come to City Hall for myself. I come to City Hall as a voice for the students and the teachers and the staff, but also our community. I don’t feel like I serve just the people that voted for me, or just the kids, or just the students. … It’s their families too, and those families are all Medford residents, so that’s what matters.
JG: Implicit in [our three jobs as a school committee member] are a couple of things. One is, strategically, where are we going and why? Districts commonly have a strategic plan that guides them and helps them say, ‘What are we going to do? What is our priority this year versus next year?’ You can’t do everything all at once. … A good strategic plan can certainly acknowledge that many things are important at the same time, but then it has to wrap that in reality around ‘what can we reasonably do.’ … The other thing I would say about our role that’s a little bit unique here is, because we have lacked systems and structures for so long, the School Committee handles an inordinate number of what I would call constituent services, where the district is not working for a child or a family in some way and the family is saying, ‘I’ve really tried. I thought I was trying to do the right thing and it’s not working, so help me.’ In a district that has solid systems and structures and good work around family and community engagement well in place, the amount of constituent services tends to be a bit less. That’s not where we are just yet.
JI: I approach being a School Committee member as being like an industrial designer in terms of needing to ‘I know my user base. I need to know who I’m working for, I need to know who I’m designing for,’ so being as public facing as possible. … For the students … it’s showing up and showing that the school system cares. It’s that sense of belonging I was talking about a lot earlier, and helping facilitate that. … I think our faculty want us to be there and want us to see what’s happening on the day to day. That’s not just faculty, that’s the nursing staff, that is the janitorial crew. … I think there’s an understanding of some of the voters who are like, ‘Well I don’t have kids in the schools, I don’t need to vote for the School Committee. They don’t really affect me.’ We do. Inherently, we are part of the municipal government, we affect you. That was proven with the overrides and possibly with the debt exclusion coming down the pipeline with the new high school. How we form policy, how we form decisions, still impacts you in some way, whether you have a kid in the schools or not. I think our role is to be facilitators, to be beacons of listening, of understanding and really doing the research of our users.
ER: The unifying theme across those relationships is accountability and transparency. In some cases, we can be a bridge between groups and in others, it’s a matter of us remaining aware of what’s going on and then communicating that information to those who may be less aware. … I always tell people, it’s not my job to solve specific problems about the day-to-day operations at the school, but to understand the patterns and the trends about what is or is not happening, so that I can work with the superintendent and the rest of the committee to put the right mechanisms in place to solve them. … In terms of direct collaboration, I think there are some scenarios where the School Committee needs to be in the room bearing witness or providing a gut check on behalf of those who aren’t in the room and sometimes we do have specific expertise that can inform the solutions to identified problems, but ultimately, our job is to set direction and ensure follow through. … When people are electing us and we are accountable to the people who elected us, it is also our responsibility to bring these questions, concerns, opportunities to the district and figure out how to integrate them and respond to them in a really authentic way. I think the scope of School Committee goes a little bit beyond the official description.
