Our greatest investment should be in the students and educators at the center of our schools. That means attracting and supporting excellent teachers, expecting strong academic outcomes, providing meaningful support and challenge, and creating opportunities for students to discover where they excel.

Unlocking Student and Teacher Potential

• Expect High Academic Achievement for All Students: The District’s most recent NJSLA proficiency rates were 70.4% in ELA and just 56.8% in math, with substantially lower achievement among Black and economically disadvantaged students. State testing isn’t the only measure of student success, but these results demand action. I will advocate for clear academic achievement goals and regular public reporting of progress at the District and school levels so educators, families, and the Board can see where students are succeeding, where they are falling behind, and respond accordingly.demand action. I will advocate for clear academic achievement goals and regular public reporting of progress at the District and school levels so educators, families, and the Board can see where students are succeeding, where they are falling behind, and respond accordingly.

• Evaluate MTSS:  High expectations require more than setting ambitious goals. They require excellent core instruction and a system that identifies when students need additional support or greater challenge. SOMSD’s new K–12 Multi-Tiered System of Support uses universal screening and student data to identify student needs and  provide targeted support. I will advocate for consistent reporting of student outcomes so we can determine whether MTSS is actually improving achievement, who is benefiting, and where adjustments are needed. 

• Attract and Retain Excellent Teachers: My priority is to protect investment in our educators by making harder choices elsewhere first. Before asking teachers and classrooms to absorb the consequences of a difficult budget, we should rigorously examine programs, contracts, administrative spending, and other expenditures (including transportation) to determine what is delivering value for students and what is not.  Our budget should make our priorities unmistakable: Excellent educators should be among the last places we look to save, not the first. I will approach the teachers’ contract expiring in June 2027 with this lens. 

• Use Teacher Expertise Intentionally: Teachers should have a meaningful voice in their assignments – and their training, experience, strengths, and interests should inform staffing decisions. I will advocate for a systematic way to capture that information directly from educators and use it when making placements. Put our teachers where their expertise can have the greatest impact.

• Expand Arts, STEM, and Hands-On Enrichment:  I will advocate for surveying educators and our broader community to identify expertise and interest in leading school-based opportunities, especially at the elementary and middle school levels. Starting these opportunities earlier can help students discover interests, build skills, and develop the foundation and confidence to pursue more challenging coursework in middle and high school.

• Turf Ritzer Field and Support Athletics: We have studied and delayed Ritzer long enough. It’s time to move forward and give our current and future student-athletes a safe, dependable field on which to compete, connect, and develop.

  • I commend the District for introducing interscholastic athletics at our middle schools, expanding opportunities for students who may not have access to costly or logistically demanding private club sports. But those opportunities require appropriate facilities. 

  • For years, our girls’ softball program has lacked a reliable field comparable to those available to other student-athletes. Ritzer has been part of the District’s Long Range Facilities Plan since 2019, and continued delays have only increased the cost.

  • As a longtime SOMA soccer parent, I have experienced our broader field limitations firsthand. Our local players have practiced late at night on turf fields in Newark and hosted home games in Orange because adequate fields were not available here. Community athletic programs help develop many of the students who eventually represent CHS, while high school athletics build skills that extend far beyond the field. Our investment in Ritzer is an investment in our students. 

A strong public school system requires significant investment. It also requires discipline about how that money is spent. Every dollar represents a choice. Money committed to one program, contract, administrative function, or initiative is money that cannot be invested somewhere else.  That is why budgeting is fundamentally an educational issue. Programs and major expenditures should be periodically evaluated for effectiveness, necessity, cost, and student impact. The goal isn’t simply to spend less—it’s to make every dollar work harder for students.

Unlocking the Potential of Every Dollar

• Adjust III to Reduce Busing: I support the Intentional Integration Initiative’s goals of expanding opportunity and ensuring that our schools reflect our community’s diversity. Where I differ with the District is in how we define success and how we use our resources to achieve it.

  • The current approach places significant emphasis and resources on redistributing students to meet a strict demographic variance — with much less attention on expanding opportunity and improving student achievement—particularly for students who have historically been underserved. Higher achievement should be the bottom line against which all of our educational initiatives are measured.

  • I support easing the demographic variance and giving greater weight to proximity so fewer students need to be bused across the District. With total District transportation spending at approximately $10.5 million this year, we should examine how much of that spending is driven by III and whether those resources could have a greater impact when invested directly in students. Savings from reducing III-related busing should be reinvested in strategies that directly expand opportunity and improve outcomes, such as recruiting and retaining qualified BIPOC educators and expanding access to effective academic intervention and tutoring.

• Invest Wisely in Special Services: Looking at special services through a cost-savings lens alone doesn’t work—not for students, families, or the District over the long term. With roughly $13 million allocated to out-of-district tuition in the District’s proposed 2026–27 budget, we should ask where stronger in-district programs, staffing, and services could better serve students while allowing more of those resources to be invested here. 

  • The same principle should guide staffing and vendor decisions.  As we learned following recent changes in our paraprofessional vendor, staffing stability, experience, compensation, benefits, and continuity all affect the quality of services students receive. Short-term savings aren’t savings if they weaken services or create greater costs down the road. 

• Prioritize Our Long-Range Facilities Needs: SOMSD’s Long Range Facilities Plan identifies more than $400 million in potential projects across our schools. We cannot do everything at once, which makes disciplined prioritization essential. I will advocate for evaluating projects based on safety and urgency, impact on students and instruction, opportunities for state funding, the consequences of further delay, and long-term financial impact. Our facilities plan should guide not only what we need to do, but what we need to do first—and why.

SOMSD should build stronger feedback loops with our community, actively seek perspectives that are often missing from district conversations, and publicly share what we learn and what we plan to do about it. 

Good governance requires both data and the voices of the people we serve. Academic results, financial data, surveys, and program evaluations can tell us what is happening, while students, educators, and families can help us understand why. Together, they should inform the policies we adopt, the investments we make, and the changes we pursue.

The District’s new five-year Strategic Plan provides an important opportunity to put this approach into practice. As the plan moves from community input to implementation, the Board’s job is to oversee that the District creates measurable goals, clear timelines, and budgets aligned with those goals—and regularly report progress back to the community.

Unlocking the potential of Community Voice & Data

• Make the “Why” Clear: I will advocate for a consistent framework for major new initiatives: What problem are we solving? Why this approach? What will it cost? What does success look like? And when and how will we evaluate the results?

  • Greater transparency builds trust, creates community buy-in, and allows the Board and the public to evaluate programs based on their intended outcomes rather than assumptions. 

• Improve Black Parents Workshop Settlement Outcomes: The Rutgers recommendations resulting from the BPW settlement have been formally closed, but the achievement gaps they were intended to address persist—and have widened for Black and economically disadvantaged students.  Compliance was never the ultimate measure of success; better outcomes for students were.  We should direct more of our resources toward interventions that directly address those disparities. I will advocate for continued monitoring of the outcomes those recommendations were intended to improve, using achievement data and community feedback to identify where progress has stalled and where further action is needed. The court monitoring of the recommendations may be closed, but the work is not. View year-over-year NJSLA academic achievement charts here.

  • Numbers alone won’t tell the whole story. Student and family experiences matter too. We need better ways to reach families who aren’t participating through traditional surveys and forums, including meeting people in the places where they already gather.

• Measure School Climate and Belonging: Every student should feel safe, supported, and welcome in our schools, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, ability, or neurodiversity. We should measure whether students are actually experiencing that sense of safety and belonging, including paying particular attention to the well-being of LGBTQ+ students at a time when many are facing increased hostility beyond our schools.

  • SOMSD has participated in the annual NJ School Climate Improvement Survey since 2022. I will advocate for clearer public reporting of trends in student, educator, and family feedback, along with more in-depth HIB and school-climate data, so we can see where we’re making progress and where students still need greater support.

• Establish a District-Wide Community Engagement Task Force: Too many families on the margins of our community feel unheard and undervalued. The District’s long history of poorly implemented programs, ill-considered cost-saving measures, and outright bias has damaged the trust necessary for meaningful collaboration. Reaching and supporting our most vulnerable students requires more than busing, screenings, surveys, and emails.

  • I propose creating a Community Engagement Task Force with ambassadors from communities that have historically been underrepresented in District conversation. These ambassadors would build relationships where trust has been lost, identify barriers to accessing programs and services, and bring community concerns directly to District leadership—creating a consistent path from listening to action.