School Committee Candidate, At-Large
Website: tiffanymjewell.com
Instagram: tiffanymjewel
Northampton Open Media – Candidate Statement
October 8, 2025
NHS Student Union – Municipal Forum
September 29, 2025
“I’m Tiffany Jewell. I’m an educator and I’ve been teaching in the Valley for 20 years. Thanks to NEF Grants, I had the opportunity to work in all of our elementary schools and JFK working with educators, working with learners, collaborating with principals and doing work with Identity, Justice and Activism. It was really exciting!
I’m also a caregiver. I have two kids: one in JFK and one at JSS. I served on the JSS council for 4 years and I’m an author. I write books for kids on social justice issues including the book “This Book is Anti-Racist” which a lot of our students have read in our schools.
I’m running for school committee because I know our schools. I know the buildings (I know where all the adult bathrooms are in our elementary schools) and because I will represent the interest of the caregivers, the students, and the community. Aso I bring a perspective that we don’t have in our school community. I’m a black biracial woman who grew up living in poverty and the daughter of an immigrant. I’m running because I’m not new to this work and I can do it.”
Video Clip – With declining enrollment, what is one bold change you think our schools should make in the next 5-10 years to stay relevant?
“I’m a big dreamer. I love to dream and I also have very realistic dreams and goals. Are you ready for the thing that’s going to be so bold? It’s investing in our schools and dreaming big. I think we need to have full-time, full week preschool. People buy in early. The earlier the better.
We need sports in the middle school. We need to have a solidly robust arts program that isn’t constantly under threat of cuts. I also support a dual language immersion program. It makes us super competitive and folks will stop wanting to go to the charter schools. Creating more consistent supports academically and socially-emotionally for our English language learners who have the highest dropout rate in our district.
We need to provide inspiring, relevant, and consistent professional development to our teachers and staff and ensure that our students with disabilities are receiving the services that are our responsibility and their right. We want our community to want to stay in Northampton.”
Video Clip – Do you believe our city’s discourse around the school budget has been productive? And if not, how do you plan to move the conversation forward?
“I don’t think we should have to fight so hard for our students to be able to attend schools that are staffed and resourced. The learners in our community have a right to receive a fair and just education and they’re not, not yet.
I think that discourse has been productive in that many more folks are aware of schools budgets, right? It’s not something we think about all the time. And I also think we shouldn’t have to spend so much time working on hypotheticals.
In the JSS council, we spent majority of our year creating arguments on why we needed to retain certain staff, when we could have been doing so many other things. I also think that we shouldn’t have to miss key hiring moments because we don’t have an agreed upon budget at the right time.
To move the conversation forward, a few things need to happen. Transparency around the budget. Members of the ALT team and the school committee can work with school councils and offer community sessions where folks can learn about the numbers and ask questions because if their questions don’t get asked, we just make up the answers ourselves.
And we while we’re fighting for our equitable share of state funding, we also need our city council to honor our schools with the funding they need to be so they can be robust and competitive. This means working with council members so we can all understand the needs of our schools that go beyond just numbers on a spreadsheet.”
Video Clip – It is no secret that our special education department has been under increased scrutiny this past year or more. How do you plan to improve our special education systems and service delivery?
“I’m seeing a pattern here. It involves investing in our schools – and that is money and time and energy and experience and expertise in so many things. My plan is: we need to first work to rebuild community and trust. We need to put our Restorative Justice training and learning to use and we also need to provide opportunities for families and the community to learn about the services that we provide because they will hold us accountable to that.
We need to work on retaining our paraprofessionals, BCBAs and early career teachers and ensure that the folks providing special education services in our schools have clear and defined roles and that those roles are truly honored. And we need interventionists in all schools at all levels all the time.
We need to communicate. We need to communicate among staff with learners, caregivers, district admin, cross grade levels, and schools. And our policies and procedures need to be clear and explicit because nothing should ever be implied.”
Question from NHS Student Union: What is one thing you hope students of NPS take away from their education in this district?
“What I want for you is I want you to be ready to take on the world and to know that you’re ready. I want you to remember those changemaker lessons you had way back in elementary school. Maybe maybe in Miss Jenny Jen’s class or Miss Mangeones, one of the amazing kindergarten teachers. And I hope you know that changemakers aren’t just folks in your history books, but they exist right here, right now within you and within us, too.
May you always seek truth and be bold and brave wherever you are. And I also want to give you some of your own words back to you. Well, Ella Hendrick’s words from her commencement speech last year: When the world tells us silently to go along, it is our job to remain rooted in what we believe. When academic freedoms are threatened and institutions disguise complacency as neutrality, it is our job to refuse to become complacent.”