Meet Natick candidate for School Committee—Catherine Brunell

March 3, 2021 by Deborah Brown Leave a Comment

The Town of Natick depends on the active participation of its citizens in governance of the Town. Natick voters will on or before March 30, 2021 cast their ballots for candidates running for School Committee, a contested race.

The Natick School Committee is an elected town-wide board. Among other things, it approves Natick’s school budget, appoints the Superintendent, and establishes educational goals and policies for Natick’s schools as a whole.

There are three candidates running for two open 3-year seats on the School Committee—Matt Brand, Shai Fuxman, and Catherine Brunell.

Natick Report invited the candidates to answer a few questions about their qualifications and priorities for the Town of Natick. Below is Catherine Brunell’s Q & A. Here is a link to Matt Brand’s and to Shai Fuxman’s.

Catherine Brunell, candidate for School Committee

Natick Report: What is your background and what qualifies you for this position?

Catherine Brunell: I am a former teacher, a coach and a mom to 5 kids. I co-founded Protect Natick’s Future last spring and
demonstrated my abilities as a community organizer and as a leader who will respond to difficult topics with information for our residents. Running a household with clear procedures and negotiating who needs what and when is my daily life. Practical life skills like listening, relating, asking for more information, advocating, and prioritizing, are where I excel.

Our family has been in the school system for over a decade, we have gone through every level with different learners and different experiences for each of our kids. I know this community, both how to listen to it and how to strengthen it. In a time of COVID recovery, having a close ear to the community is essential. I will serve with a practical, relational emphasis.

NR: If elected, what do you hope to accomplish on the School Committee during the upcoming 3-year term?

Brunell: 1) I will advocate to help students and families, within the policy and the budget objectives of the School Committee, to grapple with, persist through, and ultimately show progress in COVID.

2) With the other committee members, I would like to prioritize setting specific, known to the public, yearly goals for our own School Committee to support the district wide goals. This is a national best practice for effective boards who are focused on student achievement. (see www.nsba.org – Eight Characteristics of Effective Boards.)

3) Increase the amount of clear, two-way communication for our constituents. For example, I will host regular “Coffee and conversation” events and will communicate before and after the meetings about items on our agenda. I will do this carefully so as not to overstep the open-meeting law or committee policy, and I will stay grounded in our mission to engage and represent the public.

4) Establish or reestablish best practices for working with and across our Town Government administration and committees. With a structural deficit in town and a new Town Administrator, how our School Committee sees these relationships with new eyes will be critical.

NR: Going forward, what are the top challenges you see facing Natick Public Schools from the pandemic?

Brunell: Rejuvenating our kids, teachers, administration and families from the impacts of COVID in lots of different ways. As we continue forward, a bit weary and hopefully more aware of our resilience than ever, we need to evaluate carefully HOW all of our populations and individuals have been impacted and what we have learned as a district. Then, the School Committee needs to empower our school leaders through policy and budget to come up with a plan that incorporates the lessons learned and influences the places of need with the most impact. Social Emotional, yes! Academic recovery, for sure! Special education adjustments! And more understanding of equity as a benefit for all.

NR: Other area schools have hired a Directory of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Given that promoting equity and inclusion for all students is a top priority in Natick schools, would Natick benefit from such a hire? Why or why not?

Brunell: As a parent and as a community member my response is that this position is necessary, but not alone sufficient for the long, hard and good road that our district needs to travel with diversity, equity and inclusion. As a School Committee Member, my job will be to ask our leadership about what their plan is around equity and inclusion, to vet that plan through community feedback and research and then to figure out how we can prioritize the final decision in the budget. This is an example of a School Committee goal we could have in the 2021-2022 school year (see answer above.) As for this specific position, I cannot wade into a specific hire but I can and will give the administration feedback from our constituents and drill down on if we are achieving equity and inclusion best practices in our schools with the plan we have put in place. Policy, budget, follow through, those are levers I will have to impact our schools and this initiative.

NR: Is there anything else you would like to say that the above questions did not cover?

Brunell: When I am sitting in a public seat, a seat to which I have been elected, I do not see my name on the table. I see the word “community.” That is, I sit in that seat representing a diverse group of Natick residents—in age, experience, race, ethnicity and gender, from those with children in school to those without. I am sitting there to ask my questions and more importantly, your questions. My job is to build the community’s confidence that every decision we make is the best of all of the data-informed options that we have considered for our students, within the competing priorities that we have to navigate. At times, reasonable people will disagree with the votes I cast, but I will always be transparent and back up the decisions I come to with best practices, data and with our students at the center. Additionally, I have a personal goal to communicate to you how we use the funds that the town and the state provide, through your taxes, to ensure a maximized student experience.

NR: How should voters reach you if they want more information?

Brunell: catherinebrunell@gmail.com & www.catherine2021.com

Meet Natick candidate for School Committee—Matt Brand

March 1, 2021 by Deborah Brown Leave a Comment

There are three candidates running for two open 3-year seats on the School Committee—Matt Brand, Shai Fuxman, and Catherine Brunell.

Natick Report invited the candidates to answer a few questions about their qualifications and priorities for the Town of Natick. Below is Matt Brand’s Q & A. Here is a link to Shai Fuxman’s and to Catherine Brunell’s.

Matt Brand, candidate for School Committee

Natick Report: What is your background and what qualifies you for this position?

Matt Brand: I first got involved with Natick town government through the planning and advocacy process associated with the Natick Dog Park project, now opened and named Eddie’s Park. When I would attend the associated town meetings for the park, I started to notice that there didn’t seem to be many volunteers who had younger families in town and I began to wonder if there was some way for me to get more involved. As a professional software engineer and long time startup entrepreneur, I tried to see if there was a place where my technology background could be helpful. I volunteered to be appointed by the members of the Select Board to the Information Systems Advisory Board. This board works closely with the school system and other town departments to make technology infrastructure recommendations to other boards and committees.

From there, as I started to have a better understanding of how the town worked, I became interested in getting more involved. That is when I got appointed to join the Finance Committee, and as part of that, a member of the Education and Learning Subcommittee. This is where I got my first real taste of the Natick Public Schools budget process and loved learning about how the schools worked. In January of 2018, I was craving more involvement and attended a learning session about various open town government positions and that’s when it hit me: the School Committee would be a great way for me to be involved, use my professional skills, and give back to the community where my wife, 2 daughters, and I lived.

I was elected in March of 2018 for my first term on the committee. In addition to being a long-time technologist, I am also a former overnight summer camp director. I have always loved working with and for children and believe that it has always been a wonderful place to practice empathy and listening. I have applied those skills to my technology leadership roles. The combination of engineering and math skills along with critical thinking, empathy, objective reasoning, and creativity have served me well as a member of the Natick School Committee. I was elected by my peers on the committee to serve as the Vice-Chair and also serve as the Chair of the Policy Review subcommittee.

I apply my thoughtful and objective leadership, that I practice in my professional job, to my role on the Natick School Committee and I hope to continue to serve our community for the next 3 years.

NR: If elected, what do you hope to accomplish on the School Committee during the upcoming 3-year term?

Brand: As a committee, it is our responsibility to provide the best possible opportunity for all of our students to achieve at their highest levels. That is always the goal and what I would continue to hope to accomplish in the upcoming 3 years.

We need to ensure that all students get the support they need to not only keep up with grade-level expectations, but to thrive. In Natick, we have literacy specialists and it has proven to be a necessity and highly valuable. Data shows that in district assessments, even during COVID-19, our students’ literacy skills have continued to improve. With math, the same cannot be said. We need to hire math specialists to provide that same type of support and make sure our students have all the help they need to successfully progress in math competencies.

In addition, while we’ve done great work on developing and updating policies in the district over the past 3 years, I look forward to building more. We have recently started work on a new microaggression policy that I look forward to continuing to develop with input and feedback from our community. Making sure that ALL students feel safe and welcome in our community is essential. The policies we put in place will provide our educators and students with a framework for how to handle problems that arise and make people feel heard. It is important for us to acknowledge where we have room to improve, listen to each other, and work together to make our community a better place.

NR: Going forward, what are the top challenges you see facing Natick Public Schools from the pandemic?

Brand: The answer to this is a continuation of the previous question about what I hope to accomplish during the upcoming 3-year term. I think we face a tremendous challenge when it comes to COVID Recovery. Even in a district as relatively successful as Natick has been, a district that is used as a model across Massachusetts for how to run hybrid and remote learning models, our students will certainly have a lot of work to do in order to adapt to coming back to school full-time, both academically as well as socially and emotionally.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with a group of students, ranging in age from 5 through 17, about their experience schooling during the COVID pandemic and also about what they most looked forward to when they could go back to “normal” school. We, as adults, often look at this kind of problem through a more tactical and operational lens. I think this is important and necessary. The students’ lens is quite different, and we should acknowledge their perspective as well. They want to eat lunch in the cafeteria. They want to be able to use the lab spaces in school. They want to see their teachers without having to look through plexiglass. They want to see and be with all their friends. The social and emotional wellbeing of our learners will need to be a focus for us and will manifest, for us as a School Committee, through our budget process. This is where we need to make sure we get funding in place for the right staff and proper student services.

The schools, however, do not operate in a vacuum. We have other services and departments in Natick that also have needs and wants. Everyone has had to make sacrifices during COVID and every department has had to put off innovation and improvement in some form or another. Heading into the end of this school year, and preparing for the next year, we need to be a high functioning and efficient School Committee working collaboratively with the district to ensure a full return to school. We will need to collaborate with all of our town partners to figure out the best path forward for all members of our community and make sure that each and every member of our town can transition back to the excellence we know they deserve.

Brand: The simple answer is yes, of course Natick would benefit from hiring a Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. We, as a district, have taken big steps to improve our diversity, equity, and inclusion in the Natick Public Schools but having someone in that role, who is entirely focused on continuing and expanding the efforts in place would be of great value and importance for our community. There are a few different facets of DEI that I think are important and our district has already made nice improvements in this area:

It is important to make sure that students see diversity in their teachers. They need to be able to see people who look like them. In addition, there has been an effort to diversify the curriculum in a variety of ways. It starts with training. Part of the training that each teacher and staff member receives is to design a unit for their respective subject using diverse text. Making sure that our curriculum includes and teaches viewpoints from a variety of experiences covering Black, White, Jewish, Asian, LGBTQ+, and many others is critical. Having a Director of DEI would be a wonderful way to ensure that this effort is all-encompassing and consistent across the district.

NR: Is there anything else you would like to say that the above questions did not cover?

Brand: The past year has been a historically challenging time for public schooling. Massachusetts ranks as #1 for Pre-K-12 public schooling in the country. The Natick Public Schools has been a model district for others across Massachusetts for how to run hybrid and remote learning models. I am proud to be part of the School Committee that has supported and helped guide our leaders through this difficult time. As we end this year and plan for next year, we must stay focused and efficient as a School Committee and as a community to ensure that all students can safely get back to full-time school. We will always have big challenges in front of us and I believe my objectivity and thoughtful leadership will continue to be a great asset for our town.

NR: How should voters reach you if they want more information?

For more information on my campaign, please visit my website at mattfornatick.com or email me at mattbrandnatick@gmail.com

Natick School Committee meeting: Pool testing to start on March 1

February 24, 2021 by Deborah Brown Leave a Comment

Natick School Committee meetings are typically all-business affairs, but a little bit of glee crept in when Superintendent Anna Nolin reported the latest on pool testing during the committee’s Feb. 23rd meeting. Not only is it game on with the state program, which Natick will participate in six weeks for free, but Nolin happily let the SC know, “The Department of Education permitted 15 staffers to come to work for us” at no cost to Natick.

That means more highly qualified hands on deck, in addition to the 30 medical professionals in the community who have volunteered their time and skills for the program. Natick applied last month to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary & Secondary Education (DESE) to be considered as a pool testing community. Pooled testing from a public health perspective means combining approximately 10 – 25 respiratory swab samples into a batch (or “pool”) and then conducting a single laboratory test on the combined pool of samples to detect COVID cases. Pool testing allows labs to test more samples with fewer testing materials. If a pooled test result comes back negative, then all the samples can be presumed negative with the single test, and the individuals tested as part of that pool may stay in school. If the pooled test result comes back positive, then each of the individuals in the pool who provided a sample will need to be tested individually to determine which samples are positive.

Nolin said a concern for families that came up during community forums was that students who were in a positive pool would be removed from school and told to quarantine, even if they were not infected with COVID.

“If your child is in a positive pool, we then execute reflex testing in that group within a 15-minute time period to know who in the pool is infected. There’s no need for anybody to be out of school unless they are confirmed on that reflex test to be positive,” she said.

State staffers came to town and started on-boarding on Feb. 24, and it’s expected that the first session of pool testing will take place on Mar. 1. Those staffers will get the program rolling, while community volunteers will learn by shadowing them. When the six-week part of the program ends, Natick will go forward with volunteers and the district’s own staff.

What about returning to school full-time?

There’s no question that everyone is anxious for students to resume full-time in-person learning. That’s the Holy Grail of public school education right now.

However, Nolin noted that health conditions today are exactly as they were in the fall. “The rates of infection are now mimicking where they were when we went back to school,” she said. In addition, the CDC still recommends 6-feet distancing, so space constraints in the schools haven’t gone away. “Plus, no one is vaccinated,” she said.

Full-time, in-person learning could happen, but not immediately. By April? If teachers get vaccinated? Maybe? Well, let’s just say nobody’s willing to make any promises. Pool testing is expected to help in that kind of decision-making process by providing data-driven baseline information about the current school landscape. From there, that data will be used as a tool to make decisions about what the rest of the school year should look like.

Please support our independent journalism effort

Natick high runners eligible for Greater Framingham Running Club college scholarships

February 15, 2021 by Bob Brown Leave a Comment

Natick High School student-athletes are among those eligible for two $500 scholarships sponsored by the Greater Framingham Running Club.

The scholarships will be presented to local high school runners who plan to attend either a two or four-year accredited college or university and who also intend to run cross-country, track or recreationally while in college. The winning applicants must exemplify dedication, leadership, running talent, commitment and academic achievement. That is, the award will not necessarily go to the runners in the greater Framingham area with the most success in running, but the track or cross-country team members who have always been committed and consistently work hard to persevere, combined with academic achievement.

Applications are available now and are due by March 31.

Subscribe to our Natick Report daily email

Natick School Committee meeting: student awards; space use study; naming the new Kennedy planetarium

January 16, 2021 by Deborah Brown Leave a Comment

At a Natick School Committee meeting conducted on Mon., Jan. 11 via Zoom, SC members, school administrators, faculty members, and families cheered on seniors who won two of Natick High’s most prestigious academic awards. Other agenda items visited included a report on a space and utilization study on 7 out of 8 of Natick’s schools; and talk of naming the new Kennedy Middle School planetarium.

Here are more details on a few things jumped out at us during the 3 1/2 hour Zoom meeting:

Certificate of Academic Excellence

Supt. Anna Nolin presented the Certificate of Academic Excellence from the Mass. Association of School Superintendents to two students. The annual award is given to high school students who have distinguished themselves in the pursuit of excellence during their high school careers.

In presenting to Ryan Scully, Nolin characterized her as, “A top student, a highly principled and trustworthy individual, and a thoughtful young woman who thinks deeply about ways to make a positive impact on the world.” Nolin noted that Scully was the recipient of the Harvard Book Award; a member of the National Honor Society; continues to participate extensively in community service projects; and was a captain of the varsity basketball team.

The second recipient was Spencer James Anderson, who was lauded by Nolin for his flawless academic performance and his outstanding character. “Spencer does not wear this outstanding ability as a badge. He is one of the most considerate, hardworking, and humble students anyone can encounter,” she said. Anderson has coached youth basketball; mentored young soccer referees; is a leader in the Natick High Politics Club; and has worked on a local senate campaign.

National School Development Council Awards

In addition, two students were awarded the National School Development Council Awards presented to high school seniors who have consistently pursued a high level of academic effort, and who have also served as positive role models for the student body.

Nolin congratulated Nathan Pravda for his award, noting that, “He has an innate tendency toward helpfulness and doing the right thing.” Pravda carried a demanding course load, and regularly appeared on the high honors roll. He is a recipient of the Yale Book Award; is an instrumentalist in the jazz ensemble; and is involved in taekwando as well as with the youth group at his synagogue. For his Eagle Scout project, Nathan built outdoor seating at the Bacon Free library, designed with accessibility in mind, and with a beautiful view of the South Natick dam.

Hannah Takasaki, “An industrious and disciplined student who is kindhearted, passionate, and trustworthy,” was the second recipient of the prestigious award.” Takasaki’s sincerity and exceptional time management and organizational skills that she used to tackle a rigorous program of study were cited. In addition, she is a member of the NHS gymnastics team, a pole vaulter, and a pianist.

Congratulations to the award-winning students.

Study of space

In an effort to address what one SC member referred to as “early warning data” that space constraints in the schools could become significant problems in the future, the town has contracted with TBA Architects to put together a study on the use and utilization of space in the Natick Public Schools.

Owner and principal Jason Humphreys of TBA gave a presentation that looked at seven out of eight of of the school buildings (the exception being the newly constructed Kennedy Middle School). The capacity of each school, along with the way the space is currently used, and the space needs now and in the future were included in TBA’s presentation.

Durning a fact-finding phase, TBA toured NHS; Wilson Middle School, and Johnson, Ben-Hem, Memorial, Brown, and Lilja elementary schools. From there, TBA developed diagrams of the existing space use of each room in every school, looking at how the buildings were used all day long. The goal was to figure out if spaces are adequately utilized, or over- or under-utilized.

In general, TBA found that space is tight in a few areas. For example, it isn’t unusual across the board for a school to carve workrooms and offices out of “found” spaces, especially spaces that were originally designed as storage or music practice spaces, as well as corridors.

Johnson, the smallest school in the district, was identified as the “most deficient” when held up to Massachusetts School Building Authority guidelines.

In addition, the ten-year old NHS was called out as overcrowded and over-utilized. “It appears designed for about 3/4 of its current enrollment,” Humphreys said.

Possibilities tossed out for future planning:

Incrementally add on to and/or renovate all schools.

To alleviate the pressing needs at NHS, move the preschool out into another building, freeing up much-needed classroom space.

Perhaps relocate the district-wide IT program offices, now located at NHS.

Construct a new early childhood center, and maybe relocate some schools’ kindergarten classrooms there.

Tear down and rebuild Johnson school.

Expand and renovate Memorial school.

Naming of the Kennedy Middle School planetarium

There is a proposal to name the planetarium at Kenned after Ed Jameson, a longtime and beloved Natick teacher. There are a few administration hoops to jump through, but the idea is popular and expected to pass easily.

Tune in next time

The next School Committee meeting is scheduled for Mon, Jan. 25, 2021, 7:15pm, virtual

Checking out Natick’s new Kennedy Middle School from inside, outside, & above