What I’m Focused On

Striving For Excellence. Excellence, to me, means identifying potential, developing plans to reach your potential, and working to realize your potential. This is what I want for our school system. We should recognize the potential in every student and create an environment that enables students to reach that potential. Importantly, excellence applies to all our students from our highest academic achievers to our student athletes, our special needs students, and everyone else in between.

Reversing Concerning Trends. Yes, SPS remains a top MA school system, but there are concerning trends indicating decline - we need to address these and reverse the trends. Our rankings have slipped over the years and are now consistently outside of the top 10. I don’t hold too much weight in any ranking, and I always have trouble with how and what is being measured as part of any individual ranking, but I also recognize these metrics are used by so many people as they consider on whether Sharon should be their new home. More concerning is our recent MCAS performance. We have yet to recover to pre-COVID levels and ELA scores have actually continued to decline even after COVID. Importantly, these declining scores are across all demographics and learning groups. This should be a top issue for our administration. Rankings and standardized tests are surely not the full representation of our students’ experience in SPS but allowing them to erode will have serious consequences for both our students and our community.

Management Dashboard. Business leaders commonly utilize a management dashboard to monitor the health and wellness of a business. Why doesn’t our school system leadership do the same. These tools help to communicate clear priorities, create transparency in progress, and enable accountability for the entire organization. I would push for such logical methods to be used to ensure our school system leadership is maintaining focus and the community’s priorities. As a School Committee member, I would push our administration to translate ambiguous mission and value statements into quantitative metrics that we can measure and build a growth strategy around. Setting goals around things like rankings, MCAS scores, attendance records, grant revenue, student & teacher feedback, etc. will let us drive improvement and transparently communicate priorities to our community.

Bring Back Honors. A while back, Sharon started phasing out honors classes for 9th graders—like Honors English I and Honors World History I. Parents pushed back hard, but the change stuck, and it limits the options for our highest achieving students. Freshmen can take honors-level math, science, languages, music, art, and theater—why not English and social studies too? I fundamentally believe we should strive to keep these types of options open to our students and then actively try to lift up as many students as possible to fill these classes.

Meet The Needs Of Our Special Education Students. We must be excellent for our special needs community as well! Too many parents and students are feeling underserved, isolated, and ignored. We must do dramatically better communicating more openly with our special needs families. In an area that is so highly regulated it is easy to simply meet the regulatory requirements and stop there, and at times there are serious concerns that we are not even meeting our legal requirements. We cannot simply go through the motions for our special needs community, we need to be excellent for them too. Not doing so means increased costs from potential lawsuits, lower revenue from students leaving the district, and importantly it means leaving many of our children behind.

I’d love your input as we work to make Sharon’s schools shine again. Together, we can do this—feel free to reach out anytime!