Candidate Profile: Sarah Phillips, Ward 3 School Committee

SOMERVILLE, MA — Sarah Phillips is running for re-election to the school committee in the Nov. 2 municipal election. She faces a challenger in Daniel Mark O'Connell. 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.

Phillips serves on the school committee in Ward 3. She is an education researcher and currently works as the director of Research and Impact at Mass Insight Education and Research.

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)

45

Position Sought

School Committee, Ward 3

Party Affiliation

Democrat

Family

Husband: Joshua Rosenstock,
Children: Tzipporah (10), Pickle (deceased), Solovey (5)

Does anyone in your family work in politics or government?

No

Education

I hold a Bachelor degree from Brown University. An MSW from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in Social Policy from Brandeis University.

Occupation

Education Researcher -- 8 years post-PhD. Currently, I am the Director of Research & Impact at Mass Insight Education & Research

Previous or Current Elected or Appointed Office

School Committee, Ward 3 (Incumbent)

Campaign website

https://sarahforschoolcommitte...

Why are you seeking elected office?

I initially ran for office because my children attend the Somerville public schools. I want the best for my kids and all our kids.

I also ran because improving public education is my life’s work. After college, I taught middle school in the Oakland, CA public schools and high school in the county juvenile hall. These experiences were the first time I saw structural racism and classism in action, and I have spent the rest of my career trying to build more equitable schools and communities. With a master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Michigan and a PhD in Social Policy from Brandeis University, I spent six years working as a community social worker and now I am a researcher. For many years, I studied student perceptions of their schools and classrooms. Currently, I evaluate school improvement interventions.

In addition to my profession, improving public education is also how I contribute to my community. As a Somerville volunteer:

• I conducted policy analysis that helped get pre-school classrooms in many of our K-8s.
• I helped stop a proposed charter school.
• I served on the city's Child and Youth Study Team and Argenziano's School Improvement Council.

When I decided to run for School Committee in 2019, it seemed like an opportunity to keep doing the work I was already doing as volunteer but with a bigger impact on our kids and schools.

During my first term in office, I:

• Played a leadership role in bringing our students safely back to in-person school,
• Took steps to interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline by proposing and helping to pass a motion formally pausing two police programs in our schools.
• Gave students a formal role in policy-making, budgeting, and priority setting, and
• Was a strong ally to our paraprofessionals during their campaign for better wages and benefit.

I am running for re-election to ensure that our pandemic recovery enables every Somerville student to thrive.

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

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to be an enormous issue facing Somerville students. The Committee has been meeting nonstop since March 2020, and we haven’t talked about much else. I expect the School Committee will continue dealing with the pandemic and its after-effects for years to come. After a year and half of pandemic learning, the average student is entering the 2021-22 school year with math and reading skills that are about half a year behind where they would have been without the pandemic. Rates of anxiety and depression among children and adolescents surged during the pandemic. And racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in indicators of child well-being that I have spent my career trying to close, have grown.

During a second term on the School Committee, I will focus on ensuring that every Somerville student gets what they need to recover and thrive after the last traumatic year. We need to:

• Hire enough academic coaches and specialists, mental health professionals, nurses, youth workers, and tutors to meet our students’ unprecedented needs.
• Create more time during the school day for students to process their experiences and receive additional support,
• Expand access to high quality child-care, out of school time programming, and school-linked social services,
• Deepen the cultural responsiveness and critical consciousness of our staff,
• Improve the cultural relevance of our curriculum,
• Interrupt the school to prison pipeline,
• Diversify our teaching force, and
• Integrate our schools.

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

I believe there are three differences between me and my challenger. First, I have kids in the public schools. Because my children attend Somerville schools, I can how the district is implementing the policies I approve. Being a member of the SPS community also makes me more attuned to what our students, teachers, and administrators are doing on a daily basis. This enables me to be a better representative for Ward 3. I craft more effective policies, make better budgetary decisions, and evaluate the Superintendent with clearer evidence because I have kids in our schools.

Second, I have lived in Somerville for more than a decade and was deeply involved in Somerville education politics long before I decided to run for School Committee. Because of my volunteer activities, I understood the community. I knew the issues, and I had relationships with community leaders when I took office that made me effective from Day 1. That foundation helped me win clear, tangible victories for Somerville students during the pandemic and establish strong partnerships with key municipal leaders. I am proud to be endorsed by:

• Ward 3 City Councilor, Ben Ewen-Campen,
• State Representative, Erika Uyterhoeven,
• City Council President, Matt McLaughlin, and
• Mayor Joe Curtatone.

Finally, the educational approach of Success Academy and other “no excuses” charter schools is antithetical to the educational approach I want in Somerville’s public schools, while my challenger is running entirely on his record at a charter school in New Orleans.

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

I am grateful for the world-class COVID mitigation measures the city and school department put in place last year. With funds appropriated by the City Council and support from Tufts, we made extensive ventilation and filtration upgrades in our schools, implemented a university-style pool testing program that has been adopted by the state, and implemented strict masking, social distancing, and contract tracing policies.

Yet, Somerville was one of the last Massachusetts districts to return students to in-person school last year. Local officials’ political calculations and self-interest, internal disagreements as non-scientists about science, and the operational challenges of putting a top 1% mitigation plan in place—all of these issues created delays that harmed our students.

I worked really hard to get students back earlier, and many parents are grateful for my efforts. As Elizabeth Pinsky, MGH pediatrician, psychiatrist, and leader of Somerville Parents for an Equitable and Safe Opening, explained on social media in July:

“For those…who haven't followed super closely, Sarah was HANDS DOWN the school committee member who was most committed to bringing kids back as safely as possible. She was absolutely tireless, and her patience was unreal. As a community…we owe her big time.”

Over the past six months, I’ve thought a lot about things that might have helped us end up at a different outcome. The one I actually think would have been the most impactful— given the people occupying elected municipal and union leadership at the height of the pandemic—is having a different President or Governor in office. A different President would have been able to offer states clear guidance on opening schools during a pandemic and efficiently disbursed the resources to implement that guidance. A Democrat at the state or federal level also would have made it easier to build union support for a safe return to school, as Biden did almost as soon as he took office.

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

The clearest evidence that I can handle this job comes from my accomplishments during my first term in office and described above.

Decades of professional experience and achievements in the field of education have prepared me for this role:

• After leaving the classroom, I went on to help start one of Oakland, CA’s first community schools.
• I was part of a grassroots coalition that won late night and weekend train service through three low-income neighborhoods in Chicago.
• As the Program and Service Director I helped transform City Year Rhode Island from one of City Year’s worst performing sites to one of its best.
• As a Rappaport Fellow at the MA Executive Office of Education, I worked on Massachusetts’s Achievement Gap Act and helped shape the direction of the state’s Children’s Cabinet.
• As Vice President of Research at Tripod Education Partners, a spinoff of Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative, I helped districts like the Pittsburgh Public Schools, the Washington DC Public Schools, and Hawaii Department of Education understand students’ school experiences
• At the Director of Research & Impact at Mass Insight Education & Research, I work to evaluate and improve school improvement interventions implemented in just under a quarter of Massachusetts public districts, the Philadelphia public schools, the state of Texas, and a number of smaller districts nationwide.

These experiences have prepared me to step up when others around me don’t know what to do or don’t have the courage to say what needs to be said.

The best advice ever shared with me was:

Be present.

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

Please reach out to share your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions about our public schools!