As former school board member and higher education administrator, I believe that our public schools have a duty to provide a world-class education that prepares all students for future success, to make sure they are college or workforce ready. This will improve our children’s lives by providing them the means to pursue the American dream. It will foster economic growth in our community, because good schools make for skilled workers and more attractive communities. Finally, and most importantly, making sure all our children have a chance to make it in this community is just the right thing to do. We owe this to every single student in Fairfax County, no matter where they happen to live. This is why I am committed to improving funding for college and career readiness programs to ensure students have choices when it comes to success in life.
Serving on a school board during the pandemic I had to make many hard decisions to keep our students and staff safe. While some students had a good experience with on line learning, many did not and we must begin the work to get students back on track especially with math and reading. We also need to look at way to partner with community organizations during the summer to reduce summer learning loss and continue the recovery of math and reading skills year around
As a member of the Falls Church School Board, I worked to improve the pay scale for teachers to be competitive with neighboring jurisdictions. I am a strong supporter of the recently adopted school board collective bargaining agreement. With more and more administrators and teachers leaving the profession due to pay, increased workloads, and divisive politicians weaponizing fear to replace good, accurate curriculums with hateful propaganda, this challenge is more urgent than ever. Fairfax County must work to maintain its competitive edge, and we can do that by developing incentives to not only recruit new teachers but also to keep our veteran teachers who have become leaders in their school. We are a world-class school system because of the world-class educators.
We must live up to commitments we’ve made to become a more environmentally friendly school system. I have been a part of renovations to an existing building, which took into consideration environmentally friendly practices such as solar power and LEED certification. During my time on the Falls Church School Board, I was a leader in pushing to build an environmentally sustainable school that will have leave less of a carbon imprint. This school, Meridian High School, is LEED Gold certified and a model of what a 21st century high school should look like. I will be a leading advocate for having all future FCPS construction done to that standard as I know we can do it, having seen it happen. We also must take advantage of grants for electric buses to assist with greening our bus fleet
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