I am not afraid to admit that I'm probably not your typical pedigreed School Board candidate I don't have a lot of experience with serving in or participating in public education outside of being a consumer of the services and the art adventure coordinator for Meadow Brook elementary that said we are all about diversity and Hopkins Public Schools and I think that diversity has to expand to our school board and I know that the traits that I bring from my professional background and frankly kind of a tenacious personality make me well-suited regardless of perhaps the lack of that educational based experience

I've served on a Hopkins school board for the past eight years the last six is treasurer before being elected to the board I served on the city of Minnetonka Planning Commission for six years - as a vice chair

as an educational leader in the assi area schools currently my experience in school district leadership has been multiple has been in multiple ways including leaving equity foundational training for our entire district helping plan out how our entire system will make sure we are doing right by all of our students especially for our students of color and our students were LGBTQ

I think engaging with the community also means showing up and showing up is not necessarily at a planned event it's at the school it's at the grocery store at the coffee shop... so what I've done is really to be there

I think first and foremost it's really important to ensure that everyone in our district is able to navigate and get the information and that it's provided to them in languages that they are able to consume I think that the breadth of how we communicate is key moving forward

The second thing that I want to do is possibly conduct exit interviews with families who have left just to see what we could do to improve their experience and I also want to make sure that I listen and accommodate parents and staff

One thing to remember with declining enrollment it also is demographic something we can't change because we can't make people have babies unfortunately but I think one of the ways I we're seeing that we're counteracting declining enrollment enrollment is we're changing the way we do school and whenever you change the way you do school which is very much a part of vision 2030 one people will take notice

actually we we do have open enrollment out we also have open enrollment in and in fact we have more in than we do out so you know it's a it's a myth that we're bleeding hemorrhaging students it's being it's being held very stable

when I volunteered to call kindergarten families potential kindergarten families with our school of choice Alice Smith I was I heard over and over again from parents who had decided to their children to send their children to another school that they had never heard the stories I was sharing with them so they decided that and they told me that they would give Hopkins schools a second look they want to be connected they want their children to go to school with their neighbors but they need a reason to do so so we need to stop letting numbers tell the Hopkins story and start sharing with everyone we know the success stories that we see every day in our schools

I think finances are the most pressing issue even when you consider that 60% of our funding comes from the state it's a constant battle every year... it's not fair for us to pass the funding on to our taxpayers that is not covered by the state we've got a cross subsidy for special education in Minnesota that I think is one of the highest in the nation but it comes about because the state and the federal authorities do not fully fund special education as they promised they would when the Act was passed in 1984 so special education in the Hopkins school district is funded seven million dollars to fill that gap

I think the work that community has done in educating our youngest learners zero to five before they come into our schools to be really ready to do to be ready to be in a classroom sometimes for many years we got kids who had never been in a classroom till kindergarten and that's very hard when you have kids have gone to preschool and have not gone to any kind of school so by some of our programs are ready for K programs we're allowing kids to understand how to be in a classroom and and be part of a school in a community early enough that we can try to work through making sure that they really are functioning well and learning well right away in their schools so I think community education has a huge impact on our early learners

I I've you the biggest hurdle in our future is figuring out how to braid together fiscal responsibility with audacious goal setting I am hugely passionate about vision 2031 and incredibly realistic about the financial implications that change has on organizations and school districts in general I think that we need to be bold yet thoughtful and how we approach those changes

Some of the work the school board can do as the system-wide leaders is making sure that we are providing equity training for all of our teachers and providing opportunities for our scholars to lead the way... we need to look at the opportunity gap provided by that where some of our families have no problem experiencing museums vacations trips but how do we provide that for our families that don't have that

One of the most audacious goals I think of vision 2031 is to eliminate racial predictability on standardized tests which is a huge goal and I think for us to get there as a district we need to really start be thinking about just what Ben said allowing our teachers to unpack what's happening in their lives and their worldviews and other people's worldviews so we can work together collectively to make sure that what your race is does not predict your future

This is just not a school problem and that there was an article in the Star Tribune last week of September 6th that kind of pointed out to me that you know it's a shared responsibility with the rest of our society Minnesota has some of the deepest racial disparities in the nation whether you're talking about housing whether you're talking about income employment it's across the board and I don't think it's fair to expect schools to fix all of that but we reflect is what's happening in our society

should the school board consider it absolutely based on that research but they also need to consider that this isn't just about research it's about the community and what does the community need and so I think that we need to engage in conversations with parents with staff and to see will this be beneficial for the family not just for the student

Well I'd say definitely yes we need to change the start times you know you Dinah did it about twenty years ago ten years ago something like that why is that I did it I think last year st. Louis Park is going to do it starting next school year so there are proven models but to me the research really tells the story... what the public needs to understand is it's going to cost you some money because it's all the transportation problem we've looked at this I think two or three times in my tenure on the board and it usually ends up reflecting about another half a million dollars a year in transportation costs

we're kind of unique as a district we've got if anyone's seen a map of the district and a lot of people wonder why - does it look like that because it's a result of a merger of about 10 different school districts since about 1950 so we've got this oddly configured school district and we got to run bus routes through it and that really is is the reason we've got a higher transportation costs and some of the other districts

what we're trying to do is move from a siloed thinking approach to a systems thinking approach where the entire system is looked at as a whole and I think as we start to do that both in a lot of our education programs a lot of our teacher trainings we're also looking at that in transportation and anytime you can go from thinking of silos to systems you really can start to solve some of those complex issues like how do we deal with busing kids long distance

I believe we have hired a rockstar superintendent and am fully committed to exploring the majority of her ideas

I think there's a lot of good things about IB but I'm not sure it could coexist with our advanced placement classes at the high school I'd have to get input from teachers

coming from a system that has both IB and AP and autonomous learner programs and online learning programs in the same building it can totally be done and I support 100%

I think the way that we as the school board can support vision 2031 is to give our soup the bandwidth and the ability to make changes without having to have everything figured out yeah at the front

find funding for all of the different options that are outlined in 2031

I would say we leverage our most important asset which is our teachers and the direct instruction to make sure it's quality which is the most direct impact on our scholars