School Committee Member Jenny Graham Running For Re-Election

MEDFORD, MA — School Committee member Jenny Graham announced her campaign for re-election Tuesday. Graham is the parent of two students in the Medford Public Schools and the owner of a Medford-based small business.

Read Graham's campaign announcement below:

My first term on the School Committee has been both challenging and rewarding. Almost immediately, we were faced with the onset of a global pandemic. The pandemic upended everything we all knew about public education and challenged our district in ways we may have never anticipated.

I’m proud of the work Medford has done to keep students at the center of our efforts as we navigated the pandemic. We prioritized our remote academy to ensure that our students remained within MPS and with teachers they know and recognize, when many districts around us turned to outside sources to manage students who preferred remote learning. Medford has led the way in the Commonwealth when it comes to reopening our buildings safely. Our buildings opened long before those in our surrounding communities, even though we would have liked to see them open sooner. We completed years’ worth of deferred maintenance to ensure our air quality standards were up to pandemic mitigation standards and that our air exchange rates were safe.

Our COVID testing program was used as a model by other districts during the 2020-2021 school year. I widely credit the diligence of our testing program with low incidence of positive tests in our school community and preventing systemic outbreaks that closed buildings in surrounding communities. This, paired with the diligence of our community, allowed us to proceed forward in an ever-changing environment to ensure our students could learn safely.

I am proud to say that our work was not limited solely to the pandemic. We’ve moved forward on key initiatives which include evaluating our current curricula and assessing whether they meet our needs, modernizing many of our rules and policies, updating our school year calendar to clearly identify and prioritize religious observances of our school community that had not been previously accounted for, making plans to end the inequitable cost incurred by many high school families in order to transport children to school beginning Fall 2021, ensuring minimum wages for our high school workers in the after-school program, advocating for increased wages that will improve the reach of the after school-program for elementary school students, and overseeing a massive infusion of technology and online tools for our staff and students.”

Graham serves as the chair of the Communications, Engagement, and Strategic Planning Subcommittee. Through the work of the subcommittee, the district has made significant progress in creating a regular weekly pipeline of communication from school to families. For the first time, the district provided these communications consistently in multiple languages to support our multilingual community.

The subcommittee also led changes of practice in communication protocols to incoming kindergarten families to begin the outreach proactively and earlier than ever before so that new families know what a great place the Medford Public Schools are for their child as they begin their engagement in the K-12 world. The subcommittee championed similar changes at the middle school level and is currently reviewing the district’s first Strategic Plan in recent memory. The subcommittee prioritized hearing from families during the early part of the pandemic, during the re-opening task force work last summer, and throughout the school year on related topics and on the strategic plan.

“I believe that if we are going to meet the expectations of the community we serve, we must hear their voices and opinions as we create plans, not after those plans are in motion. I am pleased with the collaborative work of the subcommittee, my School Committee colleagues, and the Superintendent and her team to improve communications in our district. I also know that our work is far from over, and that our commitment is critical as we think about reaching those we don’t hear from regularly. I’m excited to continue this work in my next term.” Graham also sits on the Rules, Policy, and Equity subcommittee and the Curriculum subcommittee.

Graham has been focused on ensuring our students are supported by the School System budget they deserve. In this past year, she fought against significant budget cuts that led to layoffs of school staff and sought to increase transparency for the community around what our budget includes and what it doesn’t.

During the creation of the FY21 budget, she initiated a process where the school administration outlined those items and initiatives that would improve student outcomes but were not put forward in the budget request. For the first time, the school department told the community about the unmet needs that our budget can’t accommodate. She authored a comprehensive memo of these costs for the community, the Mayor, and the City Council. She is prepared to continue to fight for the budget needed to support our students, enable pandemic recovery efforts, and take care of our school buildings.

As the district and the city look ahead to significant infusion of Federal funding through ESSER and ARP, she will be focused on ensuring that the funds help our students recover from learning and social-emotional losses they experienced. Simultaneously, she will be advocating for wise use of these one-time funds to increase the rigor and quality of our curricula and investment in professional development that will have effects long after pandemic recovery is completed.

“The pandemic has laid bare the consequences of deferring maintenance costs across our school systems. While years of repairs were completed rapidly in the fall of 2020, proactive maintenance would have seen our children back in school sooner. Specifically, the state of the high school prohibited even a hybrid return for students until January. The pandemic has made it very clear that we need a real plan for the future of the building. The Medford High master plan needs to be prioritized and completed so that we can begin to understand the timeline of such a project. Projects of this size need to be completed by listening to experts about what is possible and what those costs are, putting aside our thoughts about what the best path forward might be, and ensuring we continue with Medford’s recent efforts toward environmental sustainability, LEED certification, and protecting our environment in building projects.”

In her next term, Graham will continue working to ensure that the budget is clear and transparent, that the district is efficiently using its funding, and questioning what needs to change to move forward. She’ll be focused on reviving the Medford High School Vision Committee so that the Medford High master plan can be created. This will help us ensure that we collectively reach the best decision for Medford based on the facts at hand and the recommendation of experts.

Graham graduated from Babson with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a Concentration in Finance. She is the co-owner of Zelus Consulting Group, LLC, which is celebrating its 15th year in business helping government and insurance clients improve their core operations, become more efficient, and improve the customer experience they provide. Graham achieves success for her clients through careful attention to the client’s budget, culture, and other constraints, as well as a rich understanding of how to help people change. A recognized Project Management Professional (PMP) and Certified Professional in Learning and Performance (CPLP), Graham develops strategic recommendations around improving processing times, installing new technologies to support changing business goals, and designing curriculum to teach staff so they can be efficient and improve the customer’s experience.

“With two children in the Medford public schools, I am a highly-involved parent in our school district and I truly care about the education that my children and yours receive. I am proud of the work we’ve done under the most impossible circumstances public education has seen in decades” Graham said. “But we can’t stop when we reach pandemic recovery or get back to where we were at the beginning of my term. We have work to do to build the school system that all our children, and our great city, deserve."

To learn more about Jenny and her platform, go to www.electjenny.org or follow her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/jenny4medford/.