Appointment to the Belmont School Committee

In June of 2020, I volunteered to join and lead Belmont Public Schools through a global pandemic as a member of the school committee. I am learning how to write policy that is responsive to local needs and consistent with scientific data to keep students safe and engaged in the process of rethinking what school might look like after the pandemic. It's been quite a learning curve!

In my first 4 months as a school committee member, I established and became chair of the Equity Subcommittee, which focuses on racial equity in the Belmont Public Schools. I am leading the anti-racist work in a majority white, affluent town as I do the work myself. I’m pushing the district to use this pandemic crisis as an opportunity to rethink how and where students are expected to learn. I am pushing the district leadership to make decisions about school reopening while simultaneously focusing on equity for Black and brown students and those who require special services; these decisions cannot be made independent of one another. I’m urging the district to accelerate the implementation of novel teaching methods that were already being explored. I am trying to find the appropriate rate of change for a complex system that has hardly changed in over a century in a time that is under intense scrutiny by multiple stakeholders.