Ann Arbor Public Schools

As a Board, it’s imperative to have various avenues to connect with the community - students and families, teachers and staff, district administration, and the Ann Arbor community/taxpayers. I’m a strong advocate for periodic “Listen and Learn” tours getting back into our schools to hear from each neighborhood community. It’s been quite some time since the last round, and I think it’s extremely important to re-engage and intentionally reconnect with the community. We need opportunities like these to learn and also rebuild trust and understanding, which is at a critically low level in the district. This can also extent to opportunities, such as, the prior Superintendent’s Blue Ribbon Advisory Committee, which would address emerging challenges within the district. It’s always important to hear fresh ideas on a regular basis given whatever emerging topics/challenges are arising.

I believe we should be regularly surveying our stakeholders, most notably, our students/families and our teachers/staff. We need to be open and transparent about where we stand today on various subjects and use survey results to see how our work within the district is having positive impacts on the trend of results. The survey questions should be consistent and well planned to highlight the outcomes we expect to achieve as a part of our districts vision. They need to be non-biased and non-leading questions as well. We should look at these as a starting point and focus on trend analysis to ensure district initiatives are addressing issues and achieving the results we intend, but also cannot be too quick in changing course without adequate time for changes to lead to results.

Personally, I will host regular coffee hours at different times of day and locations across the district to meet with our community, gain insights and input from the community. I also hope to attend events to support our community across the district, and to advocate for our district in decisions that impact our students at the County and State level as well.

I would engage with our community by ENGAGING in our community: Making myself available at public School events, setting up public meetings at our individual schools and reaching out to student, teacher and parent/caretaker student groups that I am not currently a part of. I would also network and reach out to leaders within the spaces who work with the students each days who may not have parents or caretakers at home that are available for such meetings. Creating spaces for open dialogues so that I can listen and learn. I would also share out what I am learning and verify. This should help our community create a forward-looking plan for Ann Arbor Public Schools.

I want to make sure that ALL students, ALL families, and ALL communities are considered and consulted when important policy decisions are made. And I want to see the Board spend its valuable time on the issues that affect students district-wide, versus the more specific issues that just happen to have the loudest supporters.

I think AAPS needs an intentional, structured method of seeking out those issues, dealing with them, and then following up. The district needs to demonstrate that they are actually listening to what families are telling them, in order to rebuild trust with the community.

And we need to make sure that families who are most impacted by inequities are consulted. We know there has been a disproportionately large increase in Black families changing to home-schooling since the pandemic. And even before that, there was a proportionately significant percentage of Black families leaving AAPS. I think we need to do what we call in the corporate world exit interviews. We need to be asking the families who left WHY they left.

-- Consider creating a Student Advisory Panel with representation from a diverse group of students. Have students selected by a counselor (including those students who seem to be the least engaged in school. Their voices matter, too.). Consider students who might be facing more challenges than most students – homelessness, food insecurity, free-and-reduced lunch. Consider those students who have faced suspensions, in addition to the high achievers and everyone else in-between. We need a variety of perspectives at the table.
I believe that by having students engaged, parents, caregivers and community members will ALL be able to provide support to help recognize what concerns students and how those needs can be addressed.

--Community forums are another way to engage students, parents, caregivers, and community members.
-- The Board does not set or determine the curriculum.

Bottom line, it's important to LISTEN to all parties involved when it comes to decision-making in our district.

I believe that our Equity committee meetings need to be taped and recorded for those in the community to watch. I also believe that we need to reach out to students, parents, caregivers and ask them to be involved in the decision making process. I would like to have a student-rep sit at our board table during the meetings to give input.

If re-elected, I would engage students and community stakeholders in the same way I do now - by holding regular open office hours that are free and open to the public. This has allowed me to hear from different school communities and look for common areas of concern. Other ways I’ve engaged with the community is through community-wide events and school volunteerism, like reading in classrooms or volunteering at community social events. I’ve also engaged the community by joining advocacy groups, like the PTOC Council and the APISA/A Parent Advisory Group. This ensures that I am hearing concerns from a cross-section of the community.