and dedicated career of public service working at the state federal and local my first term on the school committee have served on the finance pop finance subcommittee policy subcommittee capital budget committee space task force and intermittently zonta the and the burbank and the approval of a seventh configuration for the and as a school committee representative on the capital budget committee i've worked with dedicated capital budget committee members to ensure that the schools receive the national necessary capital improvements and investments like boilers flooring building envelopes and chrome books i've learned a lot about buildings working on that committee i never intended to return to balance when i was younger but i know that the opportunity to do so was a result of all of the town of belmont gave me through its wonderful school system i want to give back to the place that provided so much to me and now my children as i said in the beginning all three of us bring s i bring to experience vision and commitment to the town who provide that provided so much  daughter right now is a critical juncture for the schools and belmont in the near future decisions will be made that will impact generations of belmont children and families as the high school building project proceeds i want to use my knowledge and experience as a committed professional k to twelve educator a long time town meeting member and as a parent to help me guide the decisions that will affect not only the students in grades seven to twelve but also the younger students whose school experiences will be significantly impacted by a reconfiguration of the grade levels i'm a strong proponent of the new seven to twelve campus and i want to make sure that as a town we have transparent and thorough discussions about how to best meet the educational and developmental needs of all students in belmont as we navigate this transition as we move through the building process we also need to focus on the sustainability of school infrastructure and aim for zero net energy buildings as well as being mindful of keeping the costs down as a district we need to aim for more than just good m k s course we need to prepare our students to think critically express themselves clearly work collaboratively and communicate with all types of people we need to give them the tools to be flexible as they enter a work environment with jobs that we can't even imagine at the moment as a classroom teacher with sixteen years of teaching experience i also have a strong interest in developing ways to support teachers as they encourage our students to be engaged and informed citizens in a participatory democracy and to understand how they can effect a positive change in the world we need to coordinate a district wide anti bias curriculum in an increasingly fragmented world with growing disparity between the haves and the have nots we need to give teachers tools to help students as they develop empathy for students across all areas of different i want to thank everyone as well for having  host i also want to thank the other candidates who i as susan said i think are well qualified committed knowledgeable professionals and i think we're lucky as voters  also want to say that i hope that all of us sitting up here will encourage other folks in town to run for something i think we have a lot of untapped potential in belmont and i think we have a healthier community if people are more engaged by way of introduction i i've lived in belmont for the past sixteen years i'm a public school parent and i've spent the last twenty years working to improve public education in various roles so i began my career as a teacher fourth grade teacher and then became a montessori preschool teacher i've been a nonprofit leader with responsibility for developing budgets managing financial resources effectively fund raising as in six years as executive director of the ronnie center for education research and policy and education policy think tank focused on mass improving public education in massachusetts and now i'm on the board for several large and small non profits and have fiscal oversight responsibilities in that role as well and then after my work in non profits i moved on to the state where i served as a senior policy adviser to three education secretaries helping to inform critical decisions and establish grant programs to support public schools in the realm of english language learners stem teaching and other things and the product of public education the proud pop product of public education and i come from a family of educators as the daughter of a middle school teacher and  community college administrator and working in public education is the only thing i've ever wanted to do so i want to thank everyone for the opportunity to talk about my favorite topic before we start with the questions i'm going to review the rules with you you'll each have two minutes to answer the question and if you happen to disagree with something your opponent says you'll have the opportunity for rebuttals and those will be limited to one minute i will be keeping time and when you have ten seconds left i will quietly ring this bell to warn you so now it's time to start with the questions before we began we did a drawing to determine who would go critical aspects of this role is the balance of pay good wages to bring the best educators to belmont but also to protect taxpayers especially with capital needs coming to town including the high school what do you bring in your background that will hope you negotiate contracts i understand if there is that balance well i just purchased paid and we just finished the contracts for all the u there is one more that we have left sign off on but standing that they're all complete more all through that first face and so we'll start again now in a couple of years through that going through the process again so i think by experience doing not brings a lot to the school committee i also have a background in law so understanding contract negotiations and negotiating at all is what attorneys do every day i also in my service on the finance subcommittee understood very clearly what our budget constraints were in negotiating the contracts also what we were able to provide to the teachers their expectations were and we had a very good open open discussion about all of the issues for the teachers including their salaries and belmont is very fortunate that we have teachers who want to come to belmont to teach who have experience in other districts and then they come to belmont with that experience and pite here i don't know too many of the districts that have that benefit so even in our managing the financial and the salaries part of the contracts we still are able to have great  educators face and i have been part of teachers contract for a number of years now and i have a firm understanding of that and i think there's a misconception that sometimes the teachers just only want more and more and more and more and that if we give teachers what we want that's going to break the budget of the town and i think the really that's not the case i know that one of the major sticking points i think in this most recent contract negotiation with the teachers was about the teachers having some control over their contractual meeting time and i think as a teacher myself i understand the value that is  there when teachers have some of the say over who they get to work with what projects they're going to work with and how they can develop and enhance their curriculum in that contractual time and i think that's part of negotiations showing respect for the fact that it's not only about asking for more and more money is something that i bring to the table and i think that there's you know reasonable requests can be accommodated both sides have to have to give some ground and come to some kind of and it's going to thank you so this is one of my favorite education topics when i was at the running running center we had an initiative called the labor management initiative where we worked with districts on this very topic to try to help people to see the bargaining process as a collaborative process instead of a combative process and so we worked with several districts in massachusetts urban districts who'd been plagued by combative relationships and and our focus was to bring people together on both sides to focus on what everyone cared about which is kids and to try to take some of the opposition out of the conversations and so just to pick up on what both my other candidates have the other candidates have said i think bringing teachers in on the decision making can often result in in making more progress than you anticipated to begin with i  know when i thought about running for school committee i thought about sitting on the other side of the table from the teachers in belmont and trying to negotiate i can imagine sitting on the other side of the table from my son's teachers i'm always on their side  so i think it's this false sense of you know fighting over scarce resources and i'm just not sure it needs to be that way so we focused on a process called interest based bargaining where  people come together and start with what do we have in common because especially in our district we have folks who care about similar things and why not start there rather than starting with kind of where what are demands so anyway i think that experience is something i could bring to the table to the committee ok thank you ok very very good does anybody have any bottles i would if it's ok yes since i was so out there participated in the bargaining process just to respond to some of the things that were said again i can't we have been ratified the contracts officially so i can't really speak to you and all of the bargaining was done in a closed session it's but i think we had very good discussions with the teachers and we did not this year do interest based bargaining but we had people on both sides of the table who were teachers at one point who were currently administrators but and or professors or you know we had people who had an understanding of one another in our role and i think we had very good discussions throughout our negotiation process for it with all of the you know and i think we would continue to do that and build on that in the coming years as well i know that the school committee in the past is engaged in interspaced bargaining i think we had a new group this time and we agreed to do and we had new superintendent that hadn't participated before so we didn't knew  current contract negotiation was combated that is not the sense that i had from from the teachers i've talked with her for from the central office so thank you for breaking out it that's not what i meant to say just but i just but i do think that it's worth this this approach that belmont has been taking to focus on what the common ground that we all have talk and i one thing i would add to that is i do think that it is really important to do everything we can as a town to get the negotiations completed before the contract term is up and i know that there were some complicating factors some issues with health care costs and things like that but i think that it is really hard to maintain high teacher morale when teachers go much of a school year without a contract so in the future i would hope that that we could start earlier or do something to try to conclude the negotiations before the contract term ends thank you tara all right so in on to the next question how can the belmont decrease the number of out of district students and educate more of them in the belmont district susan i think that's always been a goal of the schools is to bring students in i think the issue that special education costs are a big factor in our budget is something that we have been looking at and studying for the last three years at a minimum my first year on the school committee we had to ask the town of belmont for an additional two hundred fifty thousand dollars to satisfy some special education costs a lot of that has to do some of it with having students go out of district i think ideally the superintendent has said this numerous times that ideally students would be here i think we have issues with not only the individual students and their needs and whether or not belmont can accommodate them but also our issues of space and i think ideally with this new high school that we're building we would have more students in belmont and we would have more space for the lab collaborative and other teachers and so forth to come into belmont you know it's always been said by the superintendent that he would love to have more students here in belmont it's just a matter of the resources that are available for the individual students because there are individual education plan and some are more complex than others and i have a very good understanding of the ip process having a son who has one so we're very fortunate that he's here in the district and he's able to get all the services he needs but i know that there are lots of parent services like can't be provided  similar situation so i do know that there are needs that can't be met by the district i do think that it's worth it to have some conversations especially with the new building coming and i am excited that the lab w potentially expand and have more space and i also think that there may be opportunities to draw in some other approaches my son has a language based learning disability and  dyslexia and i think you know i've talked with other parents of kids with the same kind of issue and i think there are probably things we can think through about that could happen in the current in the current school setting  that sort of more and more research based approaches that that support learners like that especially because there are so that is such a large portion of the learning disability thank you sure i have a lot of experience participating in developing news for the over six hundred students i've had and advocating for student needs one thing that has been really successful in my school to try to was to try to bring more programs in house and for example in the last two years we have either had language based learning classroom programs in my school with a first it was a multi grade level and then as they've seen some success with that they've added additional teachers for each grade level i teach in a middle school so six seven and eight and that's one way by developing those type of programs inside the school building especially when we have a little bit more space as was mentioned i think that the cost of one teacher salary to address needs for a number of students is  cost of probably one out of district placement so that can be a really good source of both cost savings and a way to meet students needs and keep them in the school with people that are their neighbors and friends and i think that's an important thing to do you know thank you and do any of you have rebuttals to any of that ok franklin get the next question diversity is increasing in belmont students who speak something other than english at home and coming from the immigrant households increasingly so we rate what can you do on the board to support diversity do you have any specific ideas or examples that will help transition students who may be is bringing an increased focus on developing a coordinated district wide anti bias curriculum i've heard of a lot of good examples in different schools different classrooms of individual initiatives that certain teachers are doing in certain schools are doing to actively cultivate anti bias in both students and staff but i think there's a lot of room to a lot of room left to work there for example on the b p s website the benchmarks that are the goals of the school system are from two thousand and seven and they don't mention anything to do with any kind of active anti bias curriculum and i think we've really moved past just celebrating martin luther king day and you know some heroes and holidays and things like that and we need to do a lot more to cultivate a sense of welcome for all types of people with all types of diversity including english language learners but also families that have nontraditional family structure or families that are multiracial across all types of difference i think we have room to improve until i i'll pick up on a lot of those points i wholeheartedly agree the first point i was going to make is just that i don't think it's solely up to our schools to try to create a community that is that is welcoming that i think all of us have a role in our town to play and to help helping families feel welcome when they when they come  so that kind of wider and welcomes spirit i think it cuts across our whole community as well as our schools and as a parent i love the idea of a an explicit curriculum and i think that it would be both helpful for my son and my and my elementary school or in my preschooler and i think it would be helpful for us as a family to have something that you know to have a curriculum that that is coming from the schools that informs a family conversation and community conversation i think it's really a seed that could help all of us to be more welcoming and more aware of how we are or are not welcoming to diversity so so i would say the following i think every community can make progress in this area i will say from growing up in belmont and now experiencing the schools now that my children are in it is far more diverse than it how the belmont public schools are addressing and trying to expand the diversity to their staff is that this year they're hosting i believe at the wellington school fair for to make have a more diverse staff and i think that that is  one step that we need to take in order to help to build and acknowledge the diverse culture that's developing about not we also this year will be hired hopefully a director our because lindsay rinder has been doing a great job doing the english department managing all that but getting some assistance because of the increase in demand for services or  the any more yes sorry i agree with you know that possibly having something in the curriculum to recognise and sort of broaden the children's views of the world and open them up to but again i think the belmont does a lot of that now and it can always expand on what they're building and doing  anybody else have anything to add just one thing that susan's comment made me think of i think that something like the job diversity job fair to attract a more diverse staff i think is a great way to start i also think there needs to be more staff training about how to be welcoming to different types of people for example this week my wife and i received an invitation to a meeting it was actually a special education meeting so there's a certain format that needs to be followed in a computer that generates these letters and it was addressed to tear down or father and abigail daughter mother so one needs to look for things like that that that is a you know kind of basic mistake that makes people feel not welcome when things like that happen so i think also increased staff training to look out for issues of diversity and making people feel welcome is really important  we ok so belmont's user fees for athletics and fine arts are higher than most neighboring communities maybe even the highest actually how do you think belmont public schools can eliminate or reduce these fees without impacting the budget  that is a great question i think that we the finance subcommittee has discussed fees on a regular basis and we would ideally like t eliminate them i think one thing that we have done is belmont before superintendent fail and came had some programs that required fees or that were not part of the curriculum which should have been and now students are offered and because it's required to be part of the curriculum physical education which before students were able to waive that and play a sport which would also then require them to pay a fee then they would get credit for playing which was good for some but it's now built something that's built into the curriculum i think belmont is facing some financial difficulties in the coming years we do have a two year plan for our budget that are in newtown administrator has put forward but right now our budget for next year which is forty nine percent of the town budget is a five point six percent increase and that's just covering the cost of what we need in order to sustain our schools we need to hire nine new teachers the cost drivers in the budget including rollman special education costs and health insurance premiums and included in all of that are having the students continue to pay the fees so i think we could maybe have some creative discussions within the next few years with the finance committee to look into that but at this time we haven't considered that as part of the budget thank you susan jill yes so i just looked at thinking ahead to high school what would the fees be for to support  school student participate in the human club and maybe even taking the bus and it's an extra fourteen hundred twenty five dollars so then you start to add that into our current per pupil cost and you start to see that we come up closer to the state average when you when you factor that in so i i know that we've been holding those fees that we have been increasing those which is great and i think given the i mean i've looked at the budget as well and there is just not a lot of room and i don't think anybody's willing to give up some of the things that we that we have and we're already i think a lot of us feel like we're already being very mindful of costs in terms of librarians and other other cost cutting measures so i think it's go tricky to bring fees down one thing i wondered about is the idea of in the short term at least scholarships for for students i know some are available but i wonder if there's a role you know over time of maybe incrementally  reducing those fees over time and a small portion but also looking at to folks like f b and other sources to perhaps provide scholarships in the short term until we're until we can really get rid of those fees which i agree is not going to be in the very sure in the very near term at least given all the budget constraints thank you jill sure i agree that this is a very difficult issue is quite burdensome to families particularly families that have multiple kids in the high school there are fees for the lower grades too but i think the high school families get hit with the biggest burden and i think that there's no easy answers  i know that people who have been on the school committee and been on the working on the budgets if they had been able to find something they certainly would of what have come up with what they could have done and i think it's really a bigger picture issue about how can we re pressure on the school budget as a whole and i think there's a couple of different avenues to to go down the one obvious one is we need to increase the commercial tax base in our town and i think that over the last two years many good opportunities have been passed by with a planning board that rejected many reasonable requests for things that would bring additional revenue to belmont and still maintain the character and quality of our town so i think that there's some  movement in the right direction from that side of the town government i think we need to continue to pursue state and federal grants i think with our new town administrator patrice has already i think in her first week on the job  applied for and received a grant that is bringing money additional money into belmont i think that working on reducing energy costs across all the buildings in town particularly school buildings is a way to not only do something good for the world but that those energy cost of heating and cooling buildings lights things like that those are recurring every year costs and we need to invest in reducing those energy costs and then lastly i think we need to pretty aggressively lobby for things like more state reimbursement for the circuit breaker special education last year they only funded sixty five percent of the circuit breaker law they're supposed to fund seventy five percent of that so there are some ways that we could look at relieving overall pressure on the budget which could allow us to reduce thank you tara does anybody else have anything and ok franklin we actually have time for another so really i mean i'll be honest i have overall had very good experiences my kids went to the wellington for preschool the bottler for kindergarten and now they're at the when broken all three schools like we've had great experiences with the teachers the staff you know we saw the changes at the the butler with we weren't there for the new principal but having you know being a part of the involved in the hiring process and watching all of that it seeing this new principal come in and do great things there and then mike mcallister too at the was as a new principal at the middle schools doing great things there and i think you know historically people have had issues with other teachers or administrators i've talked to parents who ask me about teachers and what the administration could do to teachers that they didn't like or that their children didn't like and every grade is can be different and i think that you know from what i've heard from teachers and staff is that they do work well together to try their best to make things work in the  schools i've had lots of ip meetings for my son they've all gone very well we've had good dialogue with the staff about those things i think i've just been very fortunate in my experiences with the bell on public schools  i have a similar answer and part of the reason i'm running for school committee is i feel like i want to do what i can to support our good schools i was trying to i was really starting to try to come up with an answer and that the one time i was frustrated is something that's now been fixed but we got a postcard saying that we weren't sure what elementary school we were going to our son was going to go to after after telling him as a five year old that's your school that's where you're going to be  then of course it turned out fine and he's in our neighborhood school and i think that was the case for most people i know not all but i think it's this enrollment issue that we all know is this huge top priority issue for our whole district and i think that's really what sparked it so i i can't say frustrated the hell out of me because that is absolutely not true but but we were a little bit nervous as we started our school career in belmont about where we got to be and trying to set a five year olds expectations was a little tricky for a few weeks but well i can also echo what susan and jill said that i've had a really positive experience with my children's teachers and we have really loved our experience at wellington and found a lot of support for our individual children and our family as a whole after our family went through a very difficult time when we had a house fire the things that i have been frustrated with i would say that one thing is actually quite recent from this week and has to do with the transparency with which some big decisions are made we are about to start a search committee for a new principal i know multiple parents who were very interested in being on that search committee and had been asking them inquiring when is this happening i'd like to apply to be on it i'd like to be interested or you know i'd like to i'm interested in being on it and we're told it's not posted at it's not happening yet and then an e mail came out this week in the superintendent's newsletter saying that the committee is already formed and we have tried to figure out who's on that committee and had to email many many  people mostly people wouldn't even tell us who the parents were on the committee and it turns out that the p t o presidents were asked to be on it they couldn't for family reasons and they suggested someone else i think that there needs to be more transparency for such a major decision like that and i know that other schools do it differently my school in winchester is going through a principal search process right now and anyone who was interested teachers parents and even middle school students applied to the director of personnel directly at the central office so i think that could be much more transparent he bottles to that question can i just i don't have a bottle i just was thinking more about not necessarily my experience but what i heard from parents and their concerns about on public schools and one of them that after school programs which the school committee is currently working with the various programs to see about getting them space to see if maybe they could increase their capacity and what we can do to work with them to make it more accommodating another big issue that parents are frustrated with is the concept of starting schools later the high school and that's something to that we are in the process of discussing and working with that group and with and listening to other parents too who are opposed to the idea of starting schools later and we're going to have a meeting at the end of march to hopefully with the presenter about the benefits of that program or changing the date or the time that the schools start so even though i've had a wonderful experience there are people out there but you know we do listen to and try to address their concerns and thing else to  up a really good point that aftercare has been and issue and i so have sort of put it out of my head but i mean i've had to make employment decisions in my family based on how did we get into aftercare not and it wellington it's a huge problem there's a huge waiting list there there needs to be more equity across the district and i think that the administration of the schools needs to take it on not necessarily running the aftercare programs but need to take on looking into what are the ways that there can be more equity important very important especially for anybody who's in elementary school or have kids in elementary school there's been times when we've heard that people you know who would go on a waiting list in kindergarten not  sort of the group that's being cast at looking at this and listening to the parents and coming up with plans having the school district run a program is not necessarily going to resolve the space issue that was one thing that i there are districts that have done that and superintendent failand for milton gave that as an example that they did do it and the issue with the space is that the p p s have programs in the schools the teachers have their classrooms and there are other programs that go on in the schools so what we are looking at as well are and what the city school committee has discussed in the past and the superintendent has talked to all these groups about what other options are there in the town and would the district maybe consider providing bussing for students to another location if it can be found i think there has been talk too about there is the basic program that does to the schools yes the other schools all have their own programs but that is something that we are considering and talking about i don't know if it's necessarily something for the district to take on i think what we would serve as a sort of a common place for parents to come to you know we would have just like there are other groups in the schools like the special education parent visor council has a website has a link and a page on our school's website th afterschool programs could have something so that parents have one place to go to to find out about their school about the programs that are offered and then maybe the district could work to provide transportation or if space can be and superintend said there has said if there was one person who is really really driven to get out there and provide this that would be great but not a lot of programs have stepped up to that region what do you think  yeah i think there is a whirl i mean i am struck by the variation across elementary schools and like length of wait list depending on what elementary school year and it just seems to me there is a role for the district i know susan is working on space i think the space issue is is the thing that remains a question but i think i feel hopeful right now that it's that there is movement and that some champion is going to step up and get engaged in that and that process but i really like the idea that the district is is more engaged in that and really this idea of looking across the district we're not that big of a district we ought to be able to to make sure that they're to manage to i think that as you mentioned one option could be that the school run everything but i don't think it has to be that way i think what does things to happen is there needs to be districts or needed fact finding about what's working in individual schools as jones says in both mentioned there are things that are working in some schools it's not working in all schools basic seems to be getting great reviews about how they're able to run things and they're able to run things with paid staff that are coordinating it i think it one answer is perhaps that it's too much to depend on the volunteer hours of p t o people like at wellington where it's run by the p t o there's a lot of really hard work that's happening there and people are working hard but that's a lot to ask of a volunteer and at smaller schools they don't have the same pool of volunteers so i think that that's a source of inequity there and for the p t o to be competing against itself for space  wellington where there's the aftercare program and the afterschool enrichment program that creates a pretty big conflict as well i think we can look to see what other space resources we have as a town is it a possibility that we could develop something that involves intergenerational programming at the senior center using busing i don't know if that would work but that's the space that we have in town and i think that a lot of people would agree that having more mixing of different subgroups of people in belmont is a great opportunity at the senior center in winchester i know there are various intergenerational programs that get people who go to the junk center in winchester out into the schools and vice versa for various things a lot from other people about the two of you but it's great to actually have a discussion about the issues and because i'm sure that i know that we will be working together at some point hopefully  as i said in the beginning we each have unique experience and backgrounds that we bring to the school committee i have the experience vision and commitment to the town of belmont it's given so much of to me and i would like to give back to it conversation among all of us and to figure out where where there's more common ground the not among us and so thank you for that thank you both of you as i said i come from this at this role from the perspective of a daughter of educators and as a product of public schools as a former teacher as a parent and to me there's no important more important work to do than the work of making sure that our public schools are vibrant and engaging places for students and teachers when it comes to the substance of the committee's work i think i can bring some deep experience and also  temperament and background for talking through contentious issues and balancing conflicting priorities without getting confrontational or contentious myself so i think i've learned a lot over the course of my thirteen years working in policy and and tackling some contentious issues about the power of communicate communicating clearly and often  of being extraordinarily hard to offend and out of disagreeing without being disagreeable so i feel like i can bring at least those temperamental characteristics to this work as well as an experience on the substance of  work and bring state level kind of lens about what what is happening and where funding might be emerging in terms of governor's priorities or department priorities or federal priorities and making sure that we capitalize on some of jill tara thank you also to jill and susan but this is more enjoyable than i expected and the fact a school committee member needs not only passion ideas but also the experience and commitment to translate that passion into action while in high school i had the privilege of serving as the student representative to the school committee in melton for two years that experience shaped my own career path as a teacher and sparked my interest to first run for town meeting in melt when i was twenty one have long held the goal of serving on the school committee again since those early experiences i spent sixteen years as a committed classroom teacher which is informed my understanding of how classrooms and schools operate as a town meeting member in belmont for over a decade i have a depth of understanding of the complexity of belmont's political and financial issues these experiences have all prepared me to be a well informed and effective school committee member and give me a unique voice to contribute to the belmont public schools i would be honored to have your vote on april third thank you on thank you tara and i want to thank all three of you i think all three of you are great candidates and i want to just remind everyone to