On Tuesday, Sept. 9, Greenfield 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. Responses have been edited for clarity and to eliminate redundancy.
David Moscaritolo, 61
Years living in Greenfield: 27
Which of your skills best lend themselves to a role on the School Committee?
“I’m very strong in finance. I run a multi-million-dollar account in the corporate world. I pay attention to detail and I communicate extremely well. Before I make a statement, I do my research so I have the data.”
What do you consider to be the most pressing issue facing our students and schools? How do you plan to tackle it?
“We don’t spend enough money on the actual education of our students, we’ve overspent on administration, and we need to look at our actual student spending and we need to make adjustments to actually spend more money on their education. We also don’t spend enough money supporting our teaching assistants.”
How do you plan to secure funding for the district amid economic restraints on the local, state and federal levels?
“We need to push to get as much funding as we can on the state side. … We can look for grants, that could help, but the state is going to give us what they decide they give us, but we should be aggressive pursuing funding from the state. On the local side, we need to support our schools. I have stated that I support my schools, and I support a full budget, but the full budget needs to be transparent. We need to not waste money and we need to look at the entire budget, because we are definitely wasting money.”
After a tumultuous budget season, how do you plan to improve the School Committee’s relationship with City Council? With the general public?
“We are not being transparent with our City Council. The School Committee and the school administration are not being transparent with the City Council, or with the taxpayers of Greenfield. We need to work together in a non-political way, and I stress, in a non-political way. We need to work together and we need to make sure we dot our i’s and cross our t’s with our finances. We need to make sure the public understands and sees what we’re spending our money on. The problems that we’ve had and the tension that we’ve had is a lack of transparency. I think that when the council asks questions and they’re approving the budget, when they ask detailed questions, they should get answers back. … When you look at the budgets that all the department heads in Greenfield have submitted, they’re thick budgets. The School Department’s was a very brief, thin budget. It lacks detail and it brings up a lot of questions. We need better transparency to the City Council. … I run a multi-million dollar account, and when somebody asks me a question about a certain program within my account, I know the financial details. I know how much money is spent, I know how much money we take in; I know what the revenue is. I know what the gross margin is. We ask questions to the school and we don’t get those answers.”
Do you have any plans to help drive student engagement and increase attendance?
“Attendance is a big problem because a lot of people are choicing out. Tons of families I’ve talked to, they’re choicing out because of the issues that they see and because they don’t feel like their child is getting the full education that they want their child to get. They don’t think the teachers are supported enough, especially with teaching aids, and they don’t see transparency in the financing. With respect to engaging the kids, we need to ask the kids questions like, what do they want to do with their life? What goals do they have? What goals do they have when they’re in the Greenfield schools? What do they want to learn? What are their concerns? There’s a lot of concerns that get thrown out there that people ask and the parents answer the kids’ questions instead of the actual kids. I’ve talked to kids, they are concerned about bullying, but people say, ‘No, there’s not,’ that’s the parents’ answer. We actually don’t ask the kids these important questions. I’d like to have some open forum programs where we actually ask the kids how they feel publicly so everybody can see their answers.”
How do you plan to increase early childhood literacy rates?
“We should be ashamed at our state numbers for literacy — we are very low. It’s been that way for many, many years. I choiced my kids out of Greenfield 20-something years ago because of these problems. We haven’t made a lot of changes with literacy. It hasn’t been at the forefront. A lot of talk about programs, a lot of talk about how to improve it, a lot of excuses. We need to dedicate more funds to this program, we need to hire more assistants to help the kids get extra attention in learning, reading and writing skills. We need to spend money where it counts — to the children — not to all these administrative programs and all these administrators and all these extra people that we have working on programs. We have to spend money on the people that are actually doing the work in the program, that will improve literacy numbers.”
How do you see your role, and the School Committee’s role, in helping students meet graduation requirements and improving standardized testing scores?
“It comes down to the same thing. We need people there to be able to help the individual kids. We need to spend our money on supporting the children with assistance, with teaching aids, with with more teachers, with a broader base of teachers. We can’t have a math teacher subbing for the science class for half the year, or more than half the year. … We need the right teachers in the right spots and we need to pay our teachers well so we can get the talent that we need. That will help us improve our numbers, improve our kids’ test scores and improve our graduation numbers.”
Is there anything about yourself that you feel voters should know?
“I have integrity, I state the facts. I don’t bring politics into anything that I do with the city — politics should not be a part of it or a prerequisite. I basically just look for the facts and I look for the truth, and that’s what I base my opinions on. I’m not politically driven. I don’t make decisions based on politics and I don’t have a political agenda.”
Melodie Goodwin, 63
Years living in Greenfield: 35
Which of your skills best lend themselves to a role on the School Committee?
“I’ve been an educator for 42 years. I’ve been a teacher, I’ve been a principal, I’ve been a director of curriculum, and the last 14 years of my career were in Greenfield. I know the children of Greenfield and I have loved the children of Greenfield, and I think the skill set I bring is knowledge of our schools, knowledge of our children and knowledge of our town.”
What do you consider to be the most pressing issue facing our students and schools? How do you plan to tackle it?
“We have declining enrollment in underperforming schools, which is a big concern for me as an educator and a citizen. We want our families to stay in Greenfield, we want to make Greenfield the place where families want their children to get their education. So we really need to do a lot of talking to families about why they’re choosing to leave. I’ve started to have that conversation and then the underperforming is really looking at curriculum and hiring people that can help us. Our reading scores really concern me — I’m an advocate for reading. I believe learning to read is a civil right, and the fact that 80% of our kids are struggling in reading means we really need to look at our our intervention and our staffing, make sure we have adequate staffing, especially at our elementary school, because that’s where reading happens. The declining enrollment is a big concern — when I first started as a principal in Greenfield, we had 1,900 children enrolled and right now we have 1,340.”
How do you plan to secure funding for the district amid economic restraints on the local, state and federal levels?
“It’s not the first time I’ve been part of this. With Proposition 2.5, as an administrator, somebody asked me to cut 26 teachers out of my brand new school. There are always, always grants for children. I’ve written millions of dollars worth of grants. One of the things that we need to be more active with is grants in Greenfield. We used to have a grant writer that that was their full-time job, and that position was eliminated. It’s also funding. … We have a lot of debt, and so we have funded our schools at a high level, but that money hasn’t reached our children. I’d look at the budgets — we like to put money in revolving accounts and just leave it there. Three years ago, we had $3 million in revolving accounts, and today we have $6 million in revolving accounts. Everybody has a rainy day fund, but there is a limit to what money is rainy day and what money should have been used to build stronger programs for the children in the schools. When you ask a taxpayer to pay taxes, it really should be used for what we think it’s going to be used for.”
After a tumultuous budget season, how do you plan to improve the School Committee’s relationship with City Council? With the general public?
“There are some beliefs of the current School Committee that I totally disagree with. You have to talk to parents. We represent parents, we represent Greenfield. This belief that we are just not doing that is disturbing for me. School Committee should be a representative body. It’s elected and we should be talking to people about what they want in their schools. The first thing I was told as a School Committee member was, ‘Oh, you’re not allowed to respond to emails from parents. Don’t talk to parents,’ and that is wrong. We need to be talking to parents and families, and listening hard to what they have to say. The relationship between City Council and School Committee has been a power move. I really feel like there are members of the City Council who want to control the School Committee and I wish, as an educator, politics just didn’t impact our schools. They’re too busy arguing about politics to notice that kids aren’t learning to read. It’s a problem and I think there has to be mutual respect. … I’ve been a leader at the school level, which makes you understand that politics have a play, but it should not be the No. 1 consideration when we’re working with schools.”
Do you have any plans to help drive student engagement and increase attendance?
“As a principal in Greenfield for years, I begged every year for a truant officer and I was willing to eliminate another staff position to get a truant officer, because Greenfield administrators have tried many things — home visits, letters, parent conferences. I’ve gotten in my car, but if nobody answers the door, there isn’t much I can do. … A good truant officer can really make a big difference in attendance. You can’t teach somebody to read if they’re not at school, so I think that’s been a problem. … The [Northwestern] District Attorney’s Office is wonderful, they’ve talked about the process with us, but there’s so much going on in the schools that the district needs one person to really focus on that.”
How do you plan to increase early childhood literacy rates?
“This is close to my heart. I really believe every child has the right to learn to read and we’re failing our children by allowing them to not learn that important skill. Early literacy starts at home; it starts with books and parents reading to children, engaging parents with children and creating the love for reading. A lot of parents hand their children their cellphone. There are things that can be put on cellphones that are interactive for young children. You can have parents turn on closed captions on their TV so children can hear the TV and see the words. … I would love to see multiple reading specialists at each elementary school and at the preschool level who can work with families who are just focused on that literacy skill. There are not enough reading specialists in Greenfield. We have a lot of great teachers and a lot of great people on board, but that’s a specialized training. When things are not working, you need specialists to come in and help you with that. We don’t have enough speech teachers either and they’re critical at helping children with language. We need some really good literacy administrators to come in and and work with our kids. We have some great literacy support people in our community and using those partnerships in a better way will help.”
How do you see your role, and the School Committee’s role, in helping students meet graduation requirements and improving standardized testing scores?
“Across Massachusetts, we’re all talking about graduation requirements, because the MCAS test is no longer required for graduation. We’re kind of stepping back. I was a principal before the MCAS test existed, and my whole career it sort of lurked over my head as something that was used to judge our children. Now I think we have an open-ended invitation to look at what we want our children to be able to do for graduation. … Most school committees around the state are going with a traditional model for high school students — four years of English, four years of math, science. There were requirements before the MCAS was added to the high school for accreditation. … You get the results in October and school’s already started. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to get the results in June and be able to work with those those numbers all summer?”
Is there anything about yourself that you feel voters should know?
“I’ve lived here a long time, but I was always working many hours. I’ve also been a caretaker for my parents, so I wasn’t out and about. My dad was in the Army for 20 years, so I’ve lived all over the world. My mom chose Greenfield as the place that she wanted to settle in because it reminded her the most of the town that she grew up in. She grew up in West Springfield on Riverdale Street, so we chose Greenfield as a family 36 years ago because it was a small town that really had a lot going on and a lot of warmth to it. As an educator, I worked in other districts, and when I had to be a caretaker, I came back to Greenfield to work. … The children really do reflect the community that they come from, so the last 14 or 15 years have taught me a lot about Greenfield through the eyes of the children who live here. I think that’s the most important thing — you want somebody on School Committee who knows the children.”
Michael Terounzo, 43
Years living in Greenfield: 42, after a year living in Sunderland
Which of your skills best lend themselves to a role on the School Committee?
“The major focus of me trying to help the School Committee would be on the finance side of it, other than being on the Ways and Means Committee for four years and the chair of it for a year and a half. I think it was kind of seen very early on that I have a predilection for math and numbers and finance, and that’s what I’m really hoping to bring to the table with School Committee, because of some of the issues with budgeting. Having sat on the City Council and having to work with the School Committee over the last four years, and seeing some of the frustrations that I’ve expressed openly in public meetings about the sharing of information coming from either the business manager or from the School Committee or the superintendent, I’m hoping to be able to add a level of transparency.”
What do you consider to be the most pressing issue facing our students and schools? How do you plan to tackle it?
“In our school system, the way I’ve seen it play out in the last 40 years, one thing we’re failing on is the offering of extracurriculars. We’re constantly fighting to keep things like foreign language arts, music, anything that’s not straight academics in our schools. Some of that is beyond our control, some of it has been a little bit of core planning and poor execution of what we’re able to do with our funds. I also would be pushing for the instructional assistants to get a better pay contract.”
How do you plan to secure funding for the district amid economic restraints on the local, state and federal levels?
“I would hope that our superintendent, whoever it is, and the mayor would be lobbying toward our state representatives and legislative folks as much as we can do as a School Committee. … I think a real big focus is the responsible spending of the funding that we do have. It takes a reevaluation of what we need versus what we already have there, vis-a-vis the heavy administration that we have, in comparison to neighboring towns and municipalities and cities. Judging by the size of our school system, we would need to have a more broad look at it to see where that money should be refocused. … We always are going to need more and push the state for more funding, but I think that the responsible use of the money that we have needs to be driven home first. Some folks will say, ‘[The shortfall is] because we don’t have the money and the state’s not giving us the money.’ That is true, but the focus should be on how we utilize the money and where it goes with what we do have. … We can’t fix everything as a School Committee, so I think we have to be clever about the way that we utilize the funds that we are given, while still pushing consistently and constantly for the state to get us more.”
After a tumultuous budget season, how do you plan to improve the School Committee’s relationship with City Council? With the general public?
“An important part of that is to include them in the conversation. I would like to see a better communication, I would like to see more authenticity. I would like to see less stonewalling, because that’s what I felt in the last four years while I’ve been there, and I’ve made that abundantly clear, that the mantra has essentially been ‘stay in your lane.’ They don’t want us (City Council) to be involved in anything. I want to build better transparency between the two bodies of government — better working relationships, because it isn’t just about one time a year that the city and the constituents of the city need to be involved in things that have to do with the school. The schools are a huge part of the budget. … Folks have the right to express their frustration with what the schools are doing and what the city is doing. If there was a better working relationship with information that’s needed or requested without difficulty, that would make it a lot easier for councilors to be able to relay that information to the people in their precinct or to all the folks in the city when they’re questioned about it, but a lot of times it seems like there’s more questions than there are answers. I would expect that the School Committee do whatever they can do to provide the information and then also vehemently request that the superintendent be forthcoming with that information, or the business manager.”
Do you have any plans to help drive student engagement and increase attendance?
“By offering things that could engage students more, the attendance would go up. I can only give a life example here, I was a very, very good student, straight A student, upper three in my class, and I didn’t really want to be there anymore because I was bored, but I found music and music kept me in school. I see programs being cut — art, sports, foreign language, all those other things that aren’t just your four core. We’re limiting the amount of kids that are gonna want to be in our school. They’re gonna see it as less desirable. They’re gonna choice out, which costs us money. By increasing the engagement through what we can offer them, we will increase their attendance.”
How do you plan to increase early childhood literacy rates?
“By putting the funding where it needs to be. If we have to do a full reassessment of what we’ve got and what we need, and things have changed, I say, ‘Do it,’ but if we’re putting the money into reading specialists, they’ve got to be realistic paying jobs for folks. … These instructional assistants, they have a certain set of skills that are required to do their job, and they deserve more pay. … We can always use more money and we can always advocate for more money from the state in the best way we can, that’s important, but the responsible use of what we’ve got is really a big focus. If we lay out that money in a more clever way, we’ll get a lot more bang for our buck, and then we’ll get a better return, essentially, on our investment in education.”
How do you see your role, and the School Committee’s role, in helping students meet graduation requirements and improving standardized testing scores?
“I was very happy to hear they got rid of the MCAS test as a graduation requirement. … Now that [MCAS] is out, it’s very important, and I think that’s where we have our trust and one of the biggest roles of a teacher is to find a way to engage kids and help them to learn, because every kid’s got a different style. You’re going to see some kids who learn more visually, some learn more auditorily. Some kids can do it better when they’re seeing it on a page and they write it multiple times, it’ll ingrain in their brain more. What it felt like to me with the MCAS test was all they were being taught was to pass this one thing, and that was going to be the requirement that would make you ready for the world. I don’t think that makes you ready for the world. I think the teachers make you ready for the world by giving you an understanding of the ways you learn things as a student, and teaching to those while still getting you the subject matter that is important. This is also why there’s such a need for those outside-of-the-core learning fields that will make more well-rounded students and will make more well-rounded kids growing up and ready for the world.”
Is there anything about yourself that you feel voters should know?
“This wasn’t something I was necessarily thinking of doing right away. I was going to take a little break, but I’m seeing the need for it and I think that I can offer the financial portion of it. … Some people think that some of my language is a little crass at times, but I think the mentality behind what I try to do is very level-headed and based in common sense. I don’t have any political affiliation that is pulling me one way or another. My main focus is just making sure the students get what they need, and making sure that you know the money is going to them and the programs that they need and keeping the keeping the class sizes reasonable, especially for the younger kids.”
Pamela Goodwin, 77
Years in Greenfield: Most of her life, with some years in eastern Massachusetts
Which of your skills best lend themselves to a role on the School Committee?
“I have taught for a number of years in the Greenfield public school system. I was certified in English, French and Spanish. I began teaching in 1971 and, interspersed in a huge period of time working for the city of Greenfield, are some years of teaching up at Mohawk Trail Regional. Additional skills would be working at the state level for tenant rights and traveling around the state with a tenant organizer, where we tried to establish tenant unions in public housing, and then I was a secretary for that state board. All of my life, I have decided that I need to do something to give back to the community. For example, I was on the Historical Commission when he lived in Shelburne Falls, and I’ve been involved in city politics. … I’ve always been dealing with the city’s youth.”
What do you consider to be the most pressing issue facing our students and schools? How do you plan to tackle it?
“It’s really hard to choose one issue. One issue that I feel very strongly about is keeping children feeling safe in the environment, dealing with any kind of bullying of any type, being sure that they feel safe in school and build trusting relationships with the adults in their life. … The funding is a huge issue, and that I believe is because the state mandates certain things, then the state says we don’t have the money. They say to towns that are not well off that the municipalities then have to pick up the burden of financing everything. The finances of the school system needs a very a good microscope. I think there are ways to take money and move it and spend it more wisely, and I would think that a School Committee would have input in that because I know they do have a budget subcommittee. We should work closely with whoever the superintendent is, even now with an interim superintendent. … If we have excess money left over, then let’s pay the teacher’s assistants an appropriate amount of money so we can compete with areas like Amherst and Northampton. If you’ve got the money, find the people and pay them well.”
How do you plan to secure funding for the district amid economic restraints on the local, state and federal levels?
“Take a look at what we already have, look closely at where it’s been going over the last few years, not just our most recent superintendent, and figure out how to spend what you do have more wisely. I don’t think we need a business manager for a huge amount of money when he’s also taking care of a whole lot of other schools. I happen to believe that we could use the financial people at City Hall and maybe even hire a few others to assist. Transportation is another place where I think people could look more closely. What are the transportation needs? Why are we funding something that was supposed to make the schools money, that’s operating as a loss? That’s what I mean about a microscope looking more closely. I do not think that cutting the very programs that kids go to school for — music, band, sports, drama — is the answer, because that’s what they go to school for and love. That’s what gets them out of bed in the morning. Our problem is the federal government says ‘No, we can’t afford it.’ Then the state says, ‘No, we can’t afford it either,’ and then the city or the town is stuck trying to figure everything out. Thinking outside of the box, really digging deep, tightening the belt is necessary.”
After a tumultuous budget season, how do you plan to improve the School Committee’s relationship with City Council? With the general public?
“I’m disappointed that people don’t come to the School Committee meetings. I’ve been to numerous ones where I’m the only person there, and I might be the only person there in person, but then there might be one or two that are remote. The only time people come out is when they’re furious, so having parents be proactive and not reactive is critical. If there is a PTA or a PTO, there has to be a connection between the School Committee and that group of people. … There’s an intermingling that can happen so that there’s not this division. … The more community events we have and the more interconnection between School Committee and parents, the better.”
Do you have any plans to help drive student engagement and increase attendance?
“Back when I was teaching, we had a truant officer. Parents had to call in and say, ‘My child is home sick,’ and then they would tick it off, and you have somebody in the office. If they do not have a truant officer, and I don’t think they do, then how are parents held accountable for a child that decided to just stay home? … You also have to have something that makes the kid want to be there. I had to put on a show every day because I was competing with cellphones. In a foreign language, I had puppets; we had to cook, we made crepes for French class. We learned some Spanish dances. … You still can group kids and you can start the critical thinking skills in the elementary level as well.”
How do you plan to increase early childhood literacy rates?
“You can start with preschool, and I know my two youngest grandkids knew how to read before they ever even got into school … because the parents read books to them when they were little. Even when there are children, like babies, you can start them in the library and you get them in a reading program. … It has to start really young, and I think autism needs to be assessed. We have so many kids on the spectrum now that if they’re not talking when it’s normal to talk and they’re non-verbal, I think a lot of early testing needs to happen.”
How do you see your role, and the School Committee’s role, in helping students meet graduation requirements and improving standardized testing scores?
“When I was a teacher, we hated trying to teach to the test, because you have your book and you have your curriculum given to you by your department chair, and we always kind of pick and choose — how am I going to get through this book when you’re forced to be able to have them do some kind of standardized testing? As far as standardized testing, I always felt that the English as a second language kids were at a huge disadvantage. It’s a toss-up, if you want to really teach to the test, and then you’re going to test them in this grade, and then you test them in this grade — I never really felt that it gave a really true picture of a child’s progress. We’re playing catch-up after the remote learning — that was a huge mistake — and we’re still dealing with behavior problems and people who still need to play catch-up. I don’t know what the answer to that is. I just know teaching to that standardized test really blows out what you’re supposed to be able to do.”
Is there anything about yourself that you feel voters should know?
“I’m looking for a school committee that has a good agenda, that has old business, new business, that has people provide input to the agenda. I’m looking for a chair who actually uses Robert’s Rules of Order, who actually calls for a vote on very important things so that the majority should rule. I wanted a democratic school committee. I also want people to be respectful of differences. I just want to throw my hat in the ring because of my skills and my years of experience in teaching, I’ve always cared about kids and I’ve always lived and worked in a mission-minded setting.”
