Recent Candidate Forum

Wednesday was the GPNA & HSHA joint forum at the Lincoln School. The opening act was the Select Board candidates followed by the School Committee candidates. I did not perform well to say the least. Nerves got the best of me and I made the decision to “stick to the hits.” I did not defend my positions well, especially when the question was raised “how do we pay for universal Prek?” It should have been a soft ball for me but I was under prepared and fumbled what should have been a simple answer. The other candidates sharing the stage collectively said we cannot afford Universal PreK. 

The reality is the current School Committee does not want to afford it. As I pointed out, the current budget for BEEP is $5.1 million dollars of which $2.5 million comes from tuition, also known as the Revolving Fund. This means that only $2.6 million or 2% comes from the PSB budget. 2% for 317 students which make up roughly 5% of the student population. I’ll repeat 2% of the district's funding goes to 5% of the students. I stand by the fact that the district could pay for Universal Prek but we lack the will to do it. In school year 23, the budget request added 18 new FTE positions for a total of $9.6 million dollars. 

I also misspoke about student to teacher ratios. My intention was to suggest that classrooms in K-8 could be adjusted to have higher student to teacher ratios in order to free resources for Prek. It was not my intention to suggest that Prek classrooms should have higher student to teacher ratios. However the current ratio of 6:1 appears to be lower than the state’s requirement of 10:1 which means there is already capacity for more Prek students. 

I also felt woefully underprepared to answer a question about equity and inclusion. More on that in a future post.