Candidate Profile: Daniel O'Connell, Ward 3 School Committee

SOMERVILLE, MA — Daniel O'Connell is running for school committee in the Nov. 2 municipal election. He is challenging incumbent Ward 3 member Sarah Phillips. There will also be citywide elections for mayor and councilor at-large, as well as elections for city council and school committee in certain wards.

Somerville Patch asked candidates to answer questions about their campaigns and will be publishing candidate profiles this week.

O'Connell has been the people analytics manager for Keurig Dr. Pepper for three years. He previously served as the director of finance and facilities at Success Preparatory Academy in New Orleans and was a middle school science teacher.

Are you running for office in Somerville? Contact Alex Newman at alex.newman@patch.com for information on being featured in a candidate profile and submitting campaign announcements to Somerville Patch.

Age (as of Election Day)

35

Position Sought

School Committee - Ward 3

Party Affiliation

Democrat

Family

Amy O'Connell, Kennedy (2)

Does anyone in your family work in politics or government?

No

Education

BA in Political Science from Notre Dame, MBA from the Wharton School (Univ of Pennsylvania), MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School

Occupation

People Analytics Manager, Keurig Dr Pepper (3 years), Director of Finance & Facilities, Success Preparatory Academy (New Orleans) (4 years), Middle School Science Teacher (3 years)

Previous or Current Elected or Appointed Office

First time candidate

Campaign website

www.danforsomervilleschools.co...

Why are you seeking elective office?

How we recover from the disruption of COVID-19 will define the direction of SPS for a generation. I can’t sit on the sidelines and let that direction be written for my daughter without using my experience to support our community. My background in urban education, school finance, and talent development will allow me to contribute to a strong, equitable recovery where all students leave SPS college and career ready.

I decided to run for Somerville School Committee in order to 1) repair the learning and developmental disruption caused by COVID-19, 2) address long-standing inequities in student achievement, and 3) to ensure better college and career readiness for all Somerville Public School (SPS) students.

The single most pressing issue facing our (board, district, etc.) is _______, and this is what I intend to do about it.

The top priority for Somerville Public Schools must be to address the gaps widened by the pandemic. Our students have experienced over a year of confusion, disappointment, and trauma unlike any of us ever experienced in school.

Overcoming this requires changing the way we think about students’ relationships with adults at school. We must invest in professional development for staff, additional mental health providers, and SEL (social emotional learning) that is embedded into how our schools operate, creating communities that can support our students’ emotional needs. Using recovery funds to purchase diagnostic tools, and craft targeted interventions, we can ensure the most vulnerable of our students don’t fall further behind.

The choices we make in the next two years will decide whether we emerge from the disruption of the pandemic stronger, or if we let the past year and a half exacerbate existing inequities.

What are the critical differences between you and the other candidates seeking this post?

My experience improving educational outcomes for high-needs students in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina uniquely positions me to find solutions in this moment for Somerville, my own community, as we deal with the impact of COVID-19. I know what it takes to create high-quality schools in the wake of seismic structural challenges because I’ve done the work before. I’ve been the one having to make the hard choices while leading a school and understand the implications. I know how to take a strategy and transform it into an effective, sustainable budget.

As a member of the Somerville School Committee, I'll leverage my classroom, administrative, and business experience to improve outcomes for every Somerville student--maximizing resources in an equitable manner while being a responsible steward of district funds. This experience will guide me in my work to improve outcomes for every single Somerville student.

I also would like to address some confusion that may have been created by my opponent's response to this question, which was premised on her criticism of the approach of Success Academy. Dr. Phillips seems to have mistakenly conflated the school where I was an administrator, Success Preparatory Academy, with an entirely different school to which I've never had an association. I invite voters to SPA's current website and to our campaign's Facebook page, to learn more about the actual Success Preparatory Academy in New Orleans.

If you are a challenger, in what way has the current board or officeholder failed the community (or district or constituency)?

Somerville schools are places where a child can get a great education. We are not yet a place where EVERY child gets a great education. The disparities are striking. A 32% gap between Economically Disadvantaged elementary students and Non-Economically Disadvantaged in reading proficiency. A 33% gap between Latinx 10th graders and their White peers in math proficiency. Graduation rates, college attendance and retention rates, MassCore completion rates, all show gaps in student outcomes. And that was before the pandemic.

Somerville’s delay in returning to in-person instruction inevitably worked to compounded the problem. To address these inequities requires refusing to return to the status quo. Luckily, we have help. With the biggest injection of federal dollars into public education in decades, we must use this as an opportunity to be bold and innovative and address the problems we know existed in the first place to make sure we create the Somerville schools ALL students deserve.

How do you think local officials performed in responding to the coronavirus? What if anything would you have done differently?

Any discussion of Somerville schools’ reopening has to start with outcomes. Somerville was one of the last school districts in the state to return students to in-person learning, including for its highest need students. As a result of not having in-person learning, Somerville students suffered academically and socially. This is not assigning blame. It is just facing hard truths.

Had I been on the School Committee at the time, I would have done everything in my power to provide our most vulnerable, highest needs students access to in-person learning if their families felt safe to do so. Districts around the country were creative with solutions to this problem, and we should have been pulling from this ingenuity to make sure the kids who needed it most got the services they deserve. Somerville is a city with ever-increasing resources. The success of our schools will come down to being able to utilize these resources to address our students' needs, and that just didn’t happen with our return to schools.

Frankly, this was a systemic failure at many levels, so I don’t think it’s helpful to try and assign blame. Instead, we need to acknowledge the damage of the reopening process not only to our students, but also to our community. We can’t move forward until we address what happened and that requires facing hard truths about the process. Thus far, there seems to be little effort to do this. We have the opportunity to learn and grow from what transpired, but that means not moving on as if it didn’t happen.

More importantly, we need to be strategic about how we undo the damage exacerbated by the reopening delay and other consequences of the pandemic. As highlighted above, this should begin with data-driven interventions aimed at restoring lost academic progress, in addition to prioritizing social emotional learning and mental health resources. This is all possible with the right leadership in place to strategically and equitably allocate federal relief dollars on top of the existing district budget.

Describe the other issues that define your campaign platform.

The disparities in educational outcomes in Somerville are unacceptable for a city with the resources and community support available. Add to that the effects of COVID-19 and the need to accelerate learning for all students, and I feel the district needs to be more strategic about how it supports struggling students. This includes making real time, data driven decisions to respond to the changing needs of the school system and ensuring the distribution of resources and funds in a manner that addresses systemic inequities.

SPS must also better prepare our students for college and for 21st century careers. This means continuing to invest and hold high standards for CTE curriculum, as well as increasing MASS CORE completion rates. As a member of the School Committee, I will leverage my education and private-sector experience to build public-private partnerships that increase student preparedness for, and access to, current and future career opportunities.

What accomplishments in your past would you cite as evidence you can handle this job?

I have the experience we need to recover from the educational damage of the pandemic and address the long-standing disparities present in our school system.

As a middle school science teacher in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, my students were incredible. But they bore the scars of systems that had let them down, from the federal government’s disaster response to a criminally under-resourced local school district. While effective teaching was necessary, it was insufficient as long as systems were failing my students.
Determined to show that systemic change was possible, I entered into school administration. As Director of Finance at Success Preparatory Academy in New Orleans, I worked with school staff to transform one of the lowest-performing of the city’s 46 public schools into the 6th-highest performing K-8 school in the district. We did this while expanding extracurricular activities, revitalizing a decrepit building, raising teachers’ salaries and benefits, and maintaining a balanced budget every year.

My work since then has been dedicated to learning from public, non-profit, and private organizations on how to scale talent solutions like those we saw work at Success. It’s these solutions I want to bring to Somerville schools to ensure our teachers get the support and development they need to feel successful, and ultimately, for our students to receive the education they deserve.

The best advice ever shared with me was:

"Having courage usually means doing it scared" - Michael Hyatt. It's at least the most relatable advice I've read since running for office for the first time.

What else would you like voters to know about yourself and your positions?

I fervently believe anyone involved in education should be guided by one question, and one question only: what's best for kids? There will be a lot of hard decisions in the years to come as our schools recover from the disruption of the pandemic. But we can make sure we do it right if, in every case, we ask ourselves what's best for kids