I have spent the last year attending school board meetings and presentations on school initiatives and I was appointed as a member of the 2025 SMS Budget Financial Advisory Committee to carefully review the 25-26 Budget and make recommendations to the SMS School Board. I have also been involved with many volunteer opportunities at the school such as polar challenge, countless field trips, and I spent a week working with students, educators and other volunteers on the 5th Grade "SeaPerch" project

Funding challenges due to reductions from state and federal grants are now impacting schools across New Hampshire and shifting that financial responsibility to our local communities. We must continue to strategically invest in our educators, school, and student data analytics to ensure we maintain the reputation of our school that drives families to move here and as a member of the Financial Advisory Committee I advocated for thoughtfully evaluating costs in a responsible way that does not impact our student-to-teacher ratios or result in reductions in school programming.

Arbitrary reductions in funding that is not backed by thoughtful analysis is not only bad for student outcomes, it's wasteful and counter-productive to the data driven interventions being developed by SMS educators today to avoid costlier, legally mandated, interventions in the future.

Our educators, who have decades of experience in their field, along with concerned parents have made it clear that they oppose increasing student to teacher ratios as this will will make their job as teachers more difficult, result in less one on one time with students, and decrease time spent in the classroom as higher numbers of students per class will naturally result in additional time spent in child study teams and 504 or IEP development time per educator.

This is also not without cost with the need to cover classes with other educators while teachers are out of the classroom more often.

There's a falsehood that supporters of public education who are passionate about providing a great education to our children have zero cost concerns. Raising a family is expensive, everyone knows this, and families of Stratham students are taxpayers and understand the pressures of increased housing costs.

That's why the members of the SMS FAC carefully scrutinized the budget and made recommendations that eliminated unnecessary costs without impact to students or a worse teaching environment for educators.

Those who would have you believe that increasing student-to-teacher ratios is only going to result in savings have not taken into account important factors that the public voiced their concerns on regarding one-on-one time with students, the costs associated with other educators having to cover a classroom during increasing number of meetings, keeping in mind; these meetings are not optional, they are to meet legal requirements for 504, IEP and Child Study Groups to evaluate students needs.

I am willing to speak with anyone and go over how we approached the budget. One such example was with the school bond for repairs being up for a vote, it was decided that a large furniture purchase, though eventually needed, would have to wait.

Another example included the FAC questioning the number of software packages that are used, some with steep licensing costs, whether they could be consolidated, and whether they have overlap in functions and some could be eliminated.

Much of our world today is driven by data analytics, and in order to uncover student needs and maximize resources we must empower educators to continue utilizing and expanding data-driven tools. Students, educators and taxpayers alike benefit from focusing resources where they are needed most and using data to act early can help to avoid more costly interventions in the future, as well as being the right thing to do for student success.

It has become commonplace for some to deride initiatives that promote inclusion as somehow shifting the focus away from core educational values, but, inclusion should be embraced as an ideal that students benefit from an environment that welcomes a broad range of ideas, beliefs and origins and the policies and environment at SMS should continue to reflect that.