School Committee Candidate, Ward 3
Unscripted Community Conversation
Bombyx Center for Arts & Equity
October 24, 2025
Video Clip – Question to candidates: Most of you probably share the view that the city can afford to move a good chunk of money into the school budgets that we’ve been underestimating research. I think that’s a big reason why all of you are up there and many of us are here. My question is: what happens if that can’t or doesn’t happen.? How do we galvanize this electricity in the air around taking care of our schools better? Everyone is serious about it, and I think there’s this energy that we haven’t seen in the city in a long time. Feel free to answer it one of two ways – either what else can we do, or just, how do we do a combination moving forward – maybe healing some of the disagreements and finding ways to just address the issue, even if we cannot do it via moving recurring 2.7 million year- over-year.
“I can sit here and give you numbers and say 44% of our students are high needs, 24% have IEPs – that’s actually not high. That is in line with the right around the line with the state average. IEPs are legal documents. We are legally obligated to provide them. But that’s all smoke and mirrors. The issue is in the numerous city council and school committee meetings I’ve watched, parents, teachers, students have pleaded, begged, even cried in these meetings asking for relief only to be told, ‘Yes, we hear you and we’re going to vote against you.’
We need a new mayor and we need a new city council and that is the only way we can really start to move us forward, away from this because – we’ve seen it in the papers – so many people have lost trust in the process. They’ve lost trust in the mayor. They’ve lost trust in city council. They’ve lost trust in school committee. They don’t believe that anything will change. And we can’t use this momentum to move forward – unless we can bring those people who don’t believe that anything will help them, with us. And the way we do that is we make changes and we vote, and we put in people who listen to them.”
Video Clip – Question to candidates: People are moving out of Northampton or taking their children out of the school district and many teachers are deciding to retire early. Is there a point where balancing the funding needs of children with special needs will be better supported along with classroom and district needs?
“I do want to touch on the fact that most of the positions lost were actually not special education positions. So we’re cutting positions for general education, too. We’re cutting general education- most of the positions were not special ed, they were general education. We’re losing classroom teachers. We’re putting these elementary school students, young first graders in bigger classes. That’s not conducive to anyone.
Even though we’re shining light on it now, one of the things that I’ve been talking about is the fact that we as a city have left the middle school to the wolves. I say this all the time and people are like, ‘What do you mean Renika?’ I mean that we have about 1,100-1,200 elementary school kids, about 1,000 in 9-12, and then we have 500-600 at JFK 6-8 because a lot of people leave the district in middle school.
So we have just consistently not lived up to our requirements for our middle schoolers and then we expect our high school teachers to do more with less, to the point where they had to find money to hire two teachers or they weren’t going to have kids kids were not going to be able to take classes they need for graduation.
We have literally just cut everything, not just special education, everything to the bone and now we are seeing the results of basically over a decade of telling the teachers to do more with less, and now they cannot.”
