2023 Worcester School Committee Race: Tracy Novick Q&A

WORCESTER, MA — In 2023, Worcester voters will elect school committee members in an entirely new way, picking representatives from districts across the city along with at-large members.

The new election system is the result of a settlement of a lawsuit filed against Worcester in 2021 by a coalition led by the Worcester NAACP over the city's all at-large school committee. Electing members at-large led to a school committee comprised of mostly white members who didn't represent the diversity of the second-largest school system in Massachusetts, the lawsuit charged.

Election expert have divided Worcester into six new school committee district lettered A to F, plus three at-large seats. The new system will create a larger school committee, and one whose members will probably be the most geographically diverse in modern times.

Incumbent Tracy Novick is returning amid this new arrangement seeking a third term (Novick also served three terms starting in 2009) in a four-way for race for two seats with school committee colleagues Laura Clancey and Sue Mailman and interim Easthampton Superintendent Maureen Binienda — the same Maureen Binienda whose contract Novick and Clancey voted not to renew in 2021.

(The four at-large school committee candidates met at a Sept. 27 candidate forum, which you can read a recap of here.)

The new school committee voting system isn't the only issue facing Worcester schools this year. The district is tackling issues like aging buildings, school safety, and outside factors like a possible ballot measure to eliminate MCAS and the incursion of a new charter school opposed unanimously by the committee earlier this year.

Along with all other school committee candidates running opposed and unopposed in 2023, Worcester Patch asked Novick, field director for the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, to respond to a questionnaire to help inform voters about her stance on local issues ahead of Election Day. Here's how she responded:

What motivated you to run for Worcester School Committee this year?

This election is Worcester’s chance to support the work that the Worcester School Committee has been doing this term with Dr. Monárrez’s administration. The fundamental structural support that schools had not been receiving and now are is something I am very proud of. We have, though, only just started that work, and it will need continued nurturing from the Committee.
We also have only three more years in which to implement our spending of Student Opportunity Act funding, and I want to be sure that is done in a way that fills what we know to be the actual gaps in funding due to state inaction for so long. That goes hand in hand with the ongoing advocacy I have been involved in at the local, state, and federal level for facilities funding.

This is the first school committee election under the new district system, and four of the new district seats are uncontested. Do you think the voting public knows that the system has changed, and if not, what role does the school committee play in spreading awareness?

I know that much of the voting public does not know that the system has changed; I continue to get questions, even from faithful voters. I think that the Committee’s ultimately unsuccessful effort to have the districts of City Council align with the School Committee (as the latter was required by legal settlement) was work in the direction of having a better informed electorate. It is truly unfortunate that the Council did not endorse this change.

Worcester is now home to the first charter school to open in Massachusetts in five years, and the current school committee opposed the opening of the Worcester Cultural Academy. What’s your stance on charter schools in general and this one specifically?

I oppose both.

The Worcester Diocese has implemented a new policy in its local schools that many have called anti-LGBTQ+, and there’s been a larger movement across the nation to ban lessons and books in schools dealing with sex and gender issues. How do you feel about these issues?

My support for our LGBTQIA+ students is unequivocal. I know that it makes a difference to students in other educational systems for whom the Worcester School Committee does not make policy to know that leaders support them for who they are.

If you could pick anything, what goals would you set for Superintendent Rachel Monárrez in the coming school committee term?

The Worcester School Committee voted new goals for Dr. Monárrez for the coming year in our meeting last month, based on district data and work done over the course of this year on the needs of the district. It was, as it should be, an interactive process with the Committee, which focuses on recruiting and retaining a workforce reflective of our student body; of implementing the results of the school safety audit and improving turnaround on work orders in facilities; in increasing third grade reading proficiency and high school student engagement.

Worcester will soon open the new Doherty High School, but many other buildings in the district are either in need of repair or replacement. How should the district prioritize these projects?

We need an updated facilities master plan. One was completed seven years ago and was shelved by the prior administration. The first priority for replacement or renovation is the Burncoat Middle/High complex, but we also need an answer to Worcester East Middle School needing windows and other work, and that doesn’t yet touch the elementary schools.
That will take funding, which is why I have been active at the local, state, and national levels on this issue. The Worcester Public Schools must have more capital funding than the $4M at which we have been frozen by the city for over a decade; that is an unreasonable amount for a district of 50 buildings ranging in age from before the Civil War to last year. We need to advocate with other Gateway cities for a complementary program to the MSBA that recognizes what the Student Opportunity Act did: that the districts with the greatest need have the least ability to fund that need. School facilities needs across the country are also beyond the scope of even states, and the federal government knows that now, which is why we also need federal action on this vital issue.

The Worcester School Committee has started a review of the district’s cell phone policy. What would you want that policy to look like?

As I said when I filed the item: a “reasonable, future ready” policy, "Our fundamental Constitutional obligation as a school district is to prepare students to be participants in a democratic society; that is why we have schools in Massachusetts. To pretend that such a future is going to involve cell phones locked in rented pouches or otherwise impounded is to abrogate our responsibility of raising the next generation such that they are prepared to manage the temptations and ills of technology even as they use it to its highest potential."

As I have noted before, educational practitioners have a long history of being instinctively reactionary to new technology. The quotes of teachers at the time of the introduction of the ballpoint pen foretold nothing but doom and gloom, and that is but one example.
I would like us to be wiser, and not to shrink our job of preparing students to be adults in a democracy.

Read previous 2023 Worcester School Committee candidate profiles:

• Laura Clancey Returns In 2023 In Bid For New Worcester Schools Seat
• Molly McCullough Returns In 2023 In Bid For New Worcester Schools Seat