Candidate for
Director; Upper Darby School District; 4 Year Term

This information is also available on my campaign website.

While this section is set aside for political philosophies, I think for School Board the question should be of educational philosophies. My educational philsophy is that every child CAN learn; however, the question of whether or not every child WILL learn is one that is left to the individual student and to his or her community.

To make sure every child does learn, the entire community must shoulder a burden. It is the community's duty to make sure every child is provided with the access to what their students need to achieve at their highest potential. And the school board must lead the way in making sure our community's demands are met.

Below you will find a few of the issues I see as important in ensuring that every student receives the best opportunity to learn in our schools.

Retaining Our Teachers The best asset any school can have is highly qualified, experienced teachers. While new teachers are an asset and contribute new approaches towards education, they need mentors to provide professional guidance. While we can invest in technologies, newer books, and such, those materials are useless without the knowledge and experience to know how to best use them. This is why we need to first invest in our teachers, so that nearby districts do not continue to offer contracts our teachers can not refuse. We must become more competitive, and to do that this must become our priority.

Ensuring Student Safety We need to procure our students safety without making their surroundings look like a high security jail. Students need to feel comfortable in their schools. We should continue to monitor who comes into our schools, keep only our main entrances unlocked, having security cameras placed in our schools, and working with our local police. However, we must also acknowledge that many of the unfortunate and tragic events to have taken place across our country did not involve people who were not supposed to be in the schools. We need to encourage open dialogue and equip our teachers with the skills to identify troubled students, so that we can provide assistance to those students before they do anything destructive to themselves and their classmates.

Reviewing Our Tax Base School taxes are largely community based. The district does receive state and federal funding; however, a large portion of the dollars needed to run our schools successfully must come from our neighborhoods. While it is undoubtedly important to lobby our legislators to increase funding for our schools, we must take responsibility locally. In doing this we must recognize that Upper Darby is a community of hard workers. Many of our neighbors need their hard earned money to maintain their families. Increasing property taxes - which is how schools are supported - can cause additional stress. I suggest we focus on revitalizing parts of our communities. By working as a community instead of individuals, we can help clean up areas and work with local companies. We need to work towards increasing the success of our current stores and restaurants and show new investors that Upper Darby is a great location for their success. By doing this, we will not only be helping to clean-up our neighborhoods and creating more jobs, but will be increasing the dollars spent in our stores and the taxable property values of our stores. This will not negatively affect our local store owners as they will already be benefiting from their increased sales. The alternative is simply to leave responsibility in the hands of our individual citizens, and this has already proven to be undesirable.

Evaluating Our Standards While I am not a proponent of standardized testing, the statistics gathered because of No Child Left Behind have shown some clear disparities between schools and racial and economic groups within our schools. Remedying the disparity in the education different groups of students are receiving needs to be looked closely at, so we can develop the best resolution. We need to look not only in the classroom for the answer to these problems but to evaluate their social environments. Of course, this does not mean we should not also reinforce the basics into our students' learning.

The problems I have with standardized testing are that it does not look at children individually, takes away from the independence of our teachers to adapt their teaching to their classrooms, and it adds tremendous stress to our students and teachers alike. The No Child Left Behind legislation has also been poorly funded and has not left individual school districts with the financial resources needed to provide what is needed, particularly more teachers and smaller classes. Assuring that our students get these resources is not something the board can do on its own; however, the board can work with local legislators to put a higher focus on education in our state and federal governments.

Continuing Registration Checks Throughout the last few years, our district has become increasingly strict in checking that only students lawfully enrolled in our schools are attending. While I believe every child should have access to the best education, we must recognize we have limited funds. The current district budget is about $128 million; which on its face is undoubtedly a lot of money. However, because we are such a large district, educating about 12,300 students this year, this is only about $10,400 per student spent annually - less than many of our surrounding areas. While we can take pride in the notion that the education we are providing to our students is to such standards that others would like to send their children to our schools; we must recognize the financial burdens. Because we are working on a fixed budget and want to make sure our students are given all of the tools they need to succeed, we need to be careful to direct our funds only to those students lawfully here.

Providing a 21st Century Education Technology's importance in society is continuously on the rise. We need to equip our students with the tools to succeed in the revolutionary world. Currently, many of our students are benefiting from in-class laptops as a result of a state grant. However, we need to work towards giving similar opportunities to all of our students. While providing individual laptops for our entire district is unfeasible, we can work towards providing teachers means to incorporate the internet into their in and out of class activities. We must remember that technology is only useful to the extent our teachers know how to use them. If we want to promote technology then we must be willing to finance educating our teachers on how to integrate it into their classrooms.

Dealing with Social Realities Students today are dealing with issues that many generations beforehand did not have to deal with. While some may overlook the current realities of our young students, they are growing up in a different time than many of their parents. Most households today are either single parent homes where the one parent must work to provide or are two parent homes where both parents must work to provide. As such, schools must take on more responsibilities for their students before, after, and during school. Part of this larger role must include providing guidance for students to make the best decisions. While some may be uncomfortable with discussing alcohol and drug use, sex, and other potentially harmful activities in the classroom, we must be willing to tackle these issues.

Focusing on Physical Health Weight has become an increasing problem for our nation and, in particular, for our youth. Our schools should promote healthy choices in our cafeterias. We must also make sure our students have access to physical activity throughout the day. By promoting these habits early on in life, students will be more likely to continue them throughout their years.

Encouraging Community Involvement Students should be encouraged to be positively involved within their respective communities. This can take many forms whether it be participating in a district sponsored neighborhood clean-ups, mowing elderly neighbors homes, or painting murals. These are simple steps that can help our students become active and feel pride in their communities and will help bring our community into our schools.

Embracing Our Community's Diversity The diversity of our area is often taken for granted, but we should start to celebrate it. Our students should take advantage of the opportunity to learn about their classmates' cultures and native lands. The diverse student population is one of the most interesting and unique parts of an Upper Darby education. But we also need to focus on learning how to embrace the differences between students in the classroom. As students with more diverse cultures and languages enter our schools, we are presented with new issues for teachers who may not know how to relate or converse with their students. We have a duty to provide all our students the best education possible, and to do this we must acknowledge and remedy this ongoing issue.