On Tuesday, Sept. 9, the city will hold a preliminary election to narrow down the field of seven candidates running for four-year School Committee seats that are up for grabs in the Nov. 4 biennial election. In advance of the preliminary election, the Greenfield Recorder asked all seven candidates eight questions about their qualifications and goals for the school district. The three candidates mentioned below are running as a slate, and responses from the four other candidates will be published in Monday’s edition. Responses have been edited for clarity and to eliminate redundancy.
Elizabeth DeNeeve, 46
Years living in Greenfield: 5
Which of your skills best lend themselves to a role on the School Committee?
“If reelected, I will be the longest standing member on the School Committee with the most experience. I am in my fourth year of a first term, and I won the School Committee Member of the Year Award for the state of Massachusetts. Not only did I win that state award for legislative advocacy, I also have been the chair of the Redistricting and Reorganizing Our Schools Subcommittee and I’ve worked on that process for two and a half years. I also chair the Community Engagement Subcommittee. I have been the secretary of the School Committee for the last two years. I’ve served on the Budget and Finance Subcommittee and on the Policy Subcommittee.”
What do you consider to be the most pressing issue facing our students and schools? How do you plan to tackle it?
“The most pressing issue to our students in the schools right now is funding. We need to have the Chapter 70 funding equation reopened at the state level, and we need to advocate as the Franklin County seat in order to get larger amounts of state funding for our students. We also need to work on teacher retention and we need to get a new business manager — that is top of mind. We also need to hire a permanent superintendent who embodies our mission statement and our policies. [Some of the other candidates are] invested in a narrative of the failure of Greenfield schools. But there is a counter-narrative — scores have gone up, literacy rates have gone up, absenteeism is down. … Community engagement has increased, and that doesn’t fit their narrative of Greenfield as a failed district and city, and that is an absolute tragedy for teachers who are doing great work and the students who are busy focusing on school achievements.”
How do you plan to secure funding for the district amid economic restraints on the local, state and federal levels?
“We don’t really have any way to secure any more local funding. We are at close to our ceiling with that and we’ve never done an override before, so I don’t think that we’ll be able to get any more money from the local tax base. The issue has always been about state funding. One of the reasons that I won that award was because I gathered together school committee members from different school committees all over the valley. … We all met together and went to Beacon Hill to advocate for more local funding. … We need state funding because the pie is only so big; you can only cut it so many ways. We need to put pressure on the Education Committee to reopen the Chapter 70 funding formula, and we’ve met with many legislators from our area that are very, very interested in doing that. That committee hasn’t met for over three years, so we cannot actually get the money that we need unless we get it from the state and put pressure on them to do so.”
After a tumultuous budget season, how do you plan to improve the School Committee’s relationship with City Council? With the general public?
“We’re already in the process of doing that. Last year was the first year that we invited City Council to our meeting. Now City Council hasn’t had any cross meetings with us yet, but that’s coming. … The other thing that I’m bringing forward is a motion to create a formal Memorandum of Engagement with the City Council, and what I’m hoping to do is create parameters for how the School Committee gives reports to the City Council and sets a time for them to cogitate questions and submit them. The goal is, next year, should I be reelected, to make sure that the City Council and the School Committee work collaboratively, hand in hand, to create the budget throughout the year. I’d like to see us meet with Ways and Means regularly. I’d like to see more Budget and Finance Subcommittee meetings happening for the School Committee, and I think that if we have those conversations early, we’ll be able to have a smoother budget season. FY25 wasn’t difficult at all; that was the smoothest budget season that I’ve had, and I think that we can have that every year, but there are some things that we need to do to get there. We need our new business manager, somebody who works full-time for the district. We also need to have these collaborative meetings and I’ve already made inroads with that — I have relationships with the new City Council members coming in and relationships with the City Council president. We’re all friends at this moment and I think that we can do a lot of good once we’re all on the same page.”
Do you have any plans to help drive student engagement and increase attendance?
“One of those goals that I have on my list is next year to create a position for a student representative to sit on the School Committee in a non-voting capacity, to have their engagement with us. That’s a best practice that a lot of school committees have instituted, and they do not get to vote, but they do get to participate. That’s really, really important, because one of the things as a school committee is that you’re sort of kept separate from the students. Your job is to hire the superintendent, set policy and develop the budget, so in order to know what the students would like, their perspective, having somebody from their student council or their school council would be great, someone who could come in as a student and talk about what they would like to see as their goals for the budget. One of the things that we can do is bring forward the ideas and goals from constituents and one of the ways that we started that was by having listening sessions with the PTO through the Budget and Finance Subcommittee. I attended listening sessions where teachers and members of the PTO told us what they would like to see in the budget, and then we brought back those goals to the Budget and Finance Subcommittee. We need to have these listening sessions, we need to interact with students more, not so much in the day-to-day, because that’s not our purview, but in order to understand what the public and the students would like to see in our budget and creating that kind of engagement will drive up student enrollment. If you’re talking about absenteeism numbers, we actually lowered our absentee rate by almost 10% under [former Superintendent] Karin Patenaude, so we actually have seen an increase in the number of students coming to class.”
How do you plan to increase early childhood literacy rates?
“When Christine DeBarge first started, one of the things on her goal list was to create a strategic plan. A strategic plan is a multi-year plan that helps the superintendent, the administrators and the teachers all understand what needs to be done in order to create a positive student achievement — that could be math literacy, that could be English language learning — they set these benchmarks. Christine created a strategic plan, and we are now in year three of five of the strategic plan. We’ve been going through the strategic plan, we receive regular reports on where we are at in the plan, and what benchmarks we’ve hit and what increases we’ve seen. We’ve already seen increases in literacy rates, math rates. We’ve seen increases in English language learner proficiency, but it’s imperative that we complete this plan, and then when we complete the plan, we have to look at the data, and then we have to make another plan with new goals so that we can continually increase student achievement, early literacy rates, math rates, science rates, all those things.”
How do you see your role, and the School Committee’s role, in helping students meet graduation requirements and improving standardized testing scores?
“That’s not the role of the School Committee, that’s a question for the superintendent, that’s a question for the administration. … With MCAS being eliminated, school districts have had to figure out what the benchmark is and we have to figure out what is acceptable. … I know that DESE is coming out with ideas of what that should be. In terms of raising standardized testing rates, what we can do is to continue to create a supportive environment for our teachers, so that we have high retention rates and not too much turnover from teachers. If people want to be there and want to continue working there, that’s what’s going to increase student achievement. Students are going to be excited to go to school. … They’re going to achieve more. Part of making that happen is having a really solid, stable, knowledgeable and experienced School Committee.”
Is there anything about yourself that you feel voters should know?
“I have seen market improvement in [Greenfield Public Schools]. I’ve seen it transform, I’ve seen it change. I’ve seen improvement occur and I feel like I’ve had a hand in that. … For the first time since 2023, we’re all rowing in the same direction. We’re all pulling in the same direction, even when people disagree and even when they cause difficulty, we’re all in it together. If I want voters to take anything away, I want them to know that the most important thing for me is to think outside the box, make good relationships with people throughout the state and really try to look behind every door, to look under all of the beds and behind all of the furniture, to find ways to get more money for the district and to employ better practices, norms and protocols so that our students can get the very best.”
Jeffrey Diteman, 45
Years living in Greenfield: 4
Which of your skills best lend themselves to a role on the School Committee?
“Overall, it’s my communication skills that I think will serve me the most. I am a people person, I get along well with people, I communicate very well in three languages and I have a great deal of experience working on various kinds of committees from my time in graduate school. Specifically, what I think sets me apart is my experience in education, and particularly my experience with improving student engagement. I was twice nominated for the Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of Massachusetts, mainly because students enjoyed my classes so much. At my current job, I have an excellent record of improving student engagement with the Spanish classes specifically, and with the school overall. We’ve been on a big campaign at Pioneer Valley Regional School to improve student morale and student retention, and that’s obviously an issue that’s very important in Greenfield as well.”
What do you consider to be the most pressing issue facing our students and schools? How do you plan to tackle it?
“The most pressing issue facing students, probably in this entire generation, is mental health, because student anxiety is very high. We see that reflected in the data, and I see that reflected in my day-to-day experience with students and their anxiety levels are interfering with their sleep. Many students are tired in class. … It interferes with their social life. We live in a stressful time. In particular in Greenfield from what I can gather, the academic crisis has to do with math and literacy — we are still falling behind. Things have improved, I’ve been looking at the numbers and we are not currently in trouble in guardianship with DESE, but our numbers could be better. We are falling below state benchmarks in math and reading. I think that these things are related. This problem with student anxiety is interfering with their ability to focus and perform on these higher-level executive tasks, which math and reading require. … What I would like to see is students who care more about reading, who retain a passion for reading. A lot of kids love to read when they’re in second and third grade, and then you start to see that fall off, so we’re missing some critical years. I think that things are going to naturally get better by with the cellphone bans in school. That’s a step in the right direction of getting away from screen addiction, but I think that we’re going to need targeted and intelligent interventions surrounding building a school community, building a strong sense of community in the schools and making sure that bullying and bigotry are not interfering with some students’ experience of schools.”
How do you plan to secure funding for the district amid economic restraints on the local, state and federal levels?
“I am a taxpayer in Greenfield. I own my home, I know how high my own property taxes are … so clearly the solution is not in raising property taxes. We could never muster the political will for that, for good reason. We need increased advocacy for Greenfield specifically, but also for all these rural communities that surround us in western Mass. What we need to do is band together and make our voice heard in Boston. We need the state of Massachusetts to offer more funding for our schools. … We know that one of the only truly reliable and consistent predictors for student academic outcomes is parent income. Kids from rich families do better in school across the board. So if we’ve got relatively poor students, and then we’re trying to compare them to richer communities, it’s pretty predictable that we’re going to fall short. We need to fund our schools and we’re asking this relatively poor community to do that. We need to be asking the state of Massachusetts, which is one of the wealthiest states in the country. That’s where the money has to come from, and we need to change the formula that we use for the allocation of funding from the state. We need to have that conversation, and we need to have more people on school committees banding together, forming coalitions with school committees from other towns in the area, so that our lawmakers in Boston are going to take us seriously.”
After a tumultuous budget season, how do you plan to improve the School Committee’s relationship with City Council? With the general public?
“One thing that is already in the works is combined meetings between subcommittees from School Committee with City Council. Elizabeth DeNeeve has already been working on that, and I support that. I’ve met several people on City Council in the last few weeks, and they all seem like wonderful people to work with. … I understand that these relations have been a little bit spotty, but if I get elected, I’m going to communicate professionally with people. I am going to advocate for people when I feel like they’re being bullied, and I’m going to make sure that we stick to the rules. … One thing I can say is that by voting for me, you get somebody fresh, without all this baggage.”
Do you have any plans to help drive student engagement and increase attendance?
“The arts are a very powerful way to drive student engagement. What you sometimes see is students — especially boys, but also girls — are sometimes a little too macho to communicate, too tough, cagey. They build up these walls around themselves to protect themselves. … In order for a school to be a community, some of those walls have to come down and students have to trust each other. They have to feel comfortable. The arts are about communication, so if a student gets into theater, they learn how to embody someone else. That’s a form of perspective taking, and it’s practice for communicating about your emotions in real life. When students feel comfortable being themselves and communicating about their emotions, they have a more positive experience in school and their behavior is better. Their engagement is better. The students … are hungry for knowledge, but you have got to make it fun. We do have to entertain this cohort of students. … I think in most subjects, there are plenty of ways to make it fun and engaging. Another thing is that we need to give students breaks that should be built into classroom time that give students a five-minute break in the middle of your lesson to just process things. That is also proven to work.”
How do you plan to increase early childhood literacy rates?
“A lot of early childhood literacy is it has to do with having books available in students’ homes. … I’m also not entirely sure what it would be like for a kid who grew up with a lot fewer books in their house, with parents who don’t have as much time to read to them, and this is one of the challenges that we face as a working-class community, is that a lot of parents simply don’t have enough time or energy to read to their kids at home. For early childhood education, there sort of needs to be more community engagement around literacy, and also there needs to be community awareness raising about the impact of screens on literacy. Kids who grow up with free access to their own personal electronic device at ages 3, 4, 5, all of the pediatricians agree this is bad for kids’ learning.”
How do you see your role, and the School Committee’s role, in helping students meet graduation requirements and improving standardized testing scores?
“The members of School Committee don’t necessarily have a lot of sway on those direct parameters of things like curricula and teaching methods. Those decisions are going to be in the hands of the superintendent, but if I’m on the School Committee, whoever is on the School Committee this next cycle is going to be hiring a new superintendent, and those are absolutely the kinds of questions that I would ask. I want to see a superintendent who is ready to prepare a plan and build on the success of the current plan. A lot of this comes back to the question of student engagement. … If students feel excited about learning, if they admire intellectuals, if they know about the kinds of writers who are writing the kinds of books that are exciting for them, and if they feel like part of an intellectual conversation, then they’re going to be more motivated.”
Is there anything about yourself that you feel voters should know?
“Voters should know that I’m a working-class guy. I come from a working-class family in Idaho. My father was a carpenter. I grew up building houses — starting at age 5 or 6, I was on job sites. I worked on a farm when I was a kid, so I’m not one of these guys with a PhD who comes from a long line of people with PhDs. Public schools have been my own personal vehicle to social mobility and opened up the world to me because I had great teachers in high school. Public education can be an avenue to social mobility, that’s why I’m going to fight for Greenfield to make sure that we continue to have high-quality public education. … We need to celebrate our wins while we keep working on the places where we’re falling behind. As a person from the working class, I’m particularly motivated to fight to make sure that students who come from similar backgrounds aren’t being left behind.”
Adrienne Craig-Williams, 45
Years in Greenfield: 2
Which of your skills best lend themselves to a role on the School Committee?
“I have four years of experience in finance and a degree from MIT, which will help me understand the budget and the numbers. I have a teaching degree and I’ve worked in schools for more than seven years. I have special education certification in New York state and I’m working on transferring my credentials over to Massachusetts.
What do you consider to be the most pressing issue facing our students and schools? How do you plan to tackle it?
“There are threats from the federal government against immigrant students, trans students, queer students and just students that are marginalized in general. Planning to tackle it will include hiring a superintendent that shares the values of our town and believes in protecting students and crafting policies that can protect students while working with the City Council to help in any way possible.”
How do you plan to secure funding for the district amid economic restraints on the local, state and federal levels?
“I will follow the lead of current School Committee members, including Elizabeth DeNeeve, who has gotten more state funding by going to various legislative bodies and found where the money is. I’m sure there’s other state money we can find and working with the City Council so that there’s a more transparent process and we all get along and feel comfortable.”
After a tumultuous budget season, how do you plan to improve the School Committee’s relationship with City Council? With the general public?
“One way is to just attend City Council meetings and make sure committees that are related to each other also have representatives. If we’re having a budget meeting, we can invite someone from the Ways and Means Subcommittee from the City Council. In general, it’s just getting to know them. I’ve already been getting to know some of the current city councilors and many of the current candidates who are running unopposed. … In terms of relationships with the city as a whole, I think we can do a better job of presenting meeting minutes and things like that, and budget documents and as a teacher, I feel like I’m very good at distilling complex ideas into manageable formats for learning and apprehension.”
Do you have any plans to help drive student engagement and increase attendance?
“Not anything in particular. That’s not quite the level of the School Committee, as far as I understand, but anything we can do to improve the student experience at the schools will encourage retention and attendance. That includes hiring the superintendent and writing policies that help it in that way.”
How do you plan to increase early childhood literacy rates?
“That’s kind of the responsibility of the superintendent, in terms of curriculum implementation and approval. Hiring a superintendent that has those values and values early childhood literacy will be of the utmost importance.”
How do you see your role, and the School Committee’s role, in helping students meet graduation requirements and improving standardized testing scores?
“We won’t have curriculum-level jurisdiction, but we can advise the superintendent. We can interview a superintendent and see what their plans are. I will leave that to the experts in the schools themselves.”
Is there anything about yourself that you feel voters should know?
“I’m very active for Palestine and you can usually find me on the common on Saturday morning, standing out for Palestine.”