My first term on the School Committee has been both challenging and rewarding.  Almost immediately, we were faced with the onset of a global pandemic.  The pandemic upended everything we all knew about public education and challenged our district in ways we may have never anticipated. 

 

I’m proud of the work Medford has done to keep students at the center of our efforts as we navigated the pandemic.  We prioritized our remote academy to ensure that our students remained within MPS and with teachers they know and recognize, when many districts around us turned to outside sources to manage students who preferred remote learning. Medford has led the way in the Commonwealth when it comes to reopening our buildings safely.  Our buildings opened long before those in our surrounding communities, even though we would have liked to see them open sooner.  We completed years’ worth of deferred maintenance to ensure our air quality standards were up to pandemic mitigation standards and that our air exchange rates were safe.  

 

Our COVID testing program was used as a model by other districts during the 2020-2021 school year. I widely credit the diligence of our testing program with low incidence of positive tests in our school community and preventing systemic outbreaks that closed buildings in surrounding communities. This, paired with the diligence of our community, allowed us to proceed forward in an ever-changing environment to ensure our students could learn safely.  

 

I am proud to say that our work was not limited solely to the pandemic.  We’ve moved forward on key initiatives which include evaluating our current curricula and assessing whether they meet our needs, modernizing many of our rules and policies, updating our school year calendar to clearly identify and prioritize religious observances of our school community that had not been previously accounted for, making plans to end the inequitable cost incurred by many high school families in order to transport children to school beginning Fall 2021, ensuring minimum wages for our high school workers in the after-school program, advocating for increased wages that will improve the reach of the after school-program for elementary school students, and overseeing a massive infusion of technology and online tools for our staff and students.  I would be honored to have your support during this campaign and your vote on November 2nd.

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