Natick 2021 Candidate Profile: Shai Fuxman For School Committee

NATICK, MA — The School Committee race in Natick in 2021 is a three-way contest for two seats.

Two incumbents — Matt Brand and Shai Fuxman — are aiming to keep their seats, but first-time candidate Catherine Brunell is hoping to earn a spot on the committee. Fuxman was appointed to the School Committee in 2019, but then won a one-year seat in the June 2020 election.

Ahead of Natick's March 30 election, Patch asked each School Committee candidate to answer our questionnaire to help voters get to know them better. Here's how Fuxman answered:

Shai Fuxman

Age (as of Election Day): 43
Position Sought: School Committee Re-election
Family: Wife, son (14), daughter (10) and two dogs
Education: Doctor of Education, Harvard University (2012); Master of Education, Harvard University (2002); Bachelor of Arts with majors in Psychology and Sociology, Brandeis University (1999)
Occupation: Senior Researcher, Education Development Center (22 years of experience)
Previous or Current Elected or Appointed Office: Natick School Committee
Campaign website: shaiforschoolcommittee.org

Why are you seeking elective office?

I am running for School Committee re-election to make sure ALL students in Natick get the instruction and supports they need to be successful—however success is defined for each and every one of them. As a parent of two NPS students, one typically developing and one with special needs, I understand the importance of providing each student an educational path that builds on their strengths and addresses their challenges. As an education expert who works with school districts across the country, I have a keen understanding of research-based educational practices that can be implemented in our schools to help students succeed. I also bring a deep commitment to equity and inclusion in our schools—making sure that each of our students feels welcomed and supported.

Implementing best practices to support student success is going to be particularly critical in the coming years, as we bring our students back to full-time in-person education. Our students will need supports for both academic and social-emotional recovery after over a year of learning under pandemic conditions. I bring both a commitment and the expertise to guide our schools in providing the right balance between academic and social-emotional supports.

I am also running to bring a collaborative approach to local government. Ever since I joined School Committee almost two years ago, I have been connecting with members of the various town government entities—members of the Select Board, Finance Committee, Town Meeting, and Board of Health. My goal has been to gain an understanding of the entire Natick government ecosystem so that I can better represent the Natick residents on School Committee, and so that I can build partnerships to address the town’s challenges, particularly those involving our budget. If re-elected, I will continue to use the relationships I have developed and the mutual respect I have gained with fellow elected officials to ensure that we are investing our town resources effectively and equitably to serve ALL our residents, including our children.

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

The single most pressing issue facing our School Committee is supporting our students’ return to full-time in-person instruction. To do so well, we need to find the balance between three concerns: health safety, academic recovery, and social and emotional wellbeing. Realistically speaking, we will likely need to continue putting in place some COVID-19 precautions well into next academic year including mask-wearing and physical distancing. The types of precautions we will have to take and how/when we fade them out will be determined by the school administration and the School Committee, with guidance from federal, state, and local health officials. As a School Committee member, I am committed to using the best science to protect the health of our students and teachers. Second, I am committed to ensuring that our schools support our students’ academic recovery and ongoing academic success. We know from both national and local data that students are likely to come back to school with varying degrees of academic regression, particularly in math. That is why we need to make sure our schools are implementing effective strategies such as differentiated learning and Response to Intervention (RTI) to help all students meet and surpass academic benchmarks in the years to come. As a researcher in education, I will collaborative with the school administration to ensure that we have the right staff, resources, and strategies to make this happen. Lastly, the sense of isolation from peers due to physical distancing, lack of structure and routine provided by full-time school, and the general health and economic uncertainty due to COVID-19 have all taken a toll on our students’ social and emotional well-being and their mental health. As a result, mental health referrals have increased, and parents have been reporting their increasing concerns about their children’s social and emotional well-being. As a national expert in Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) and school-based mental health supports, I bring both the know-how and the commitment to work with the NPS administration to ensure our educators are well-prepared to support our students when they come back to school.

Last year, I brought my education expertise to the district’s reopening committee—the committee that planned how we would educate students in the current academic year. If re-elected I will continue to serve as the only School Committee member on this committee to make sure we are prepared to bring our students back to school next year in a way that supports both their physical and mental health, as well as their academic recovery and success.

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

There are two critical differences between me and the other candidates. First, I bring to this role professional expertise in education. I have a doctorate in education and over 20 years of experience applying research to improve education practice and policy. In my role, I conduct trainings with school administrators and educators all over the country on critical topics in education including Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), substance misuse prevention in schools, and developing effective systems of school-based mental health supports. For example, through a partnership with Panorama Education (the company Natick uses to assess students’ SEL skills), I recently conducted a virtual training to over 800 educators across the country on how to build effective systems of SEL and mental health supports using the research-based Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) framework. Last fall, I also conducted a training to over 120 superintendents and assistant superintendents (including Dr. Nolin) through the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents on supporting educators’ well-being during COVID-19. I have also published in peer-review journals and books about various topics related to education, such as addressing substance misuse among LGTBQ youth, preventing cyberbullying among youth with disabilities, and promoting critical thinking skills through education. For me, improving education has been and continues to be a lifelong pursuit. It has been an honor and privilege to bring this expertise to improve our schools right here in Natick and I will continue to do so if re-elected.

Second, I bring a series of personal experiences and perspectives that are critical to School Committee—namely my experience as an immigrant and as a parent of a child with special needs. I grew up in Israel, Mexico, and Venezuela, learning English as a third language as an ELL student starting in third grade. I came to the US just shy of my 18th birthday and have since made this country my home. Four years ago, I took the oath of citizenship at Faneuil Hall, and made a personal commitment to be an active and responsible participant in our democratic process. As a new American, I do not take for granted both the privileges and the responsibilities we have as citizens. In fact, becoming a citizen is one of the experiences that motivated me to become civically engaged and to join local government. Finally, another experience that motivated me to join School Committee is raising a child with special needs. Like many parents in these circumstances, my wife and I had both positive and not-so-positive experiences advocating for our daughter to get the education she needs to reach her potential. During a moment of frustration, early on in our journey, I decided to work towards improving special education in Natick by joining and eventually chairing the Special Education Parent Advisory Council (SEPAC). Since joining SEPAC, and through my time on School Committee, I have become an advocate not only for better special education, but for making sure that ALL of our students get the supports they need to succeed.

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

I am not a challenger, I am an incumbent who is very proud of the work that I have done along with my fellow School Committee members, the administration, and our teachers particularly over the past year. All of us, working together, put an incredible amount of effort to continue to educate our children as safely and as effectively as humanly possible during a global pandemic. As a district, through the leadership of the School Committee, we were able to ensure that ALL of our students were connected technologically to their teachers, their peers, and to their education; we put in place all the health precautions needed to keep our students, teachers, and community safe; we negotiated contracts with our unions to ensure they were well supported and in turn supported our students; we addressed our students’ social and emotional needs through best practices in student engagement and by offering all extra-curricular activities adapted for safety; and we weathered a difficult budget process without having to make ANY of the drastic cuts that were presented to us. Completely shifting educational systems within a district often takes years, yet we managed to do so effectively in a matter of weeks.

I am aware that one of the other candidates used this space to criticize the School Committee’s collective performance, and mine in particular. These criticisms are both unfair and uninformed. First, the candidate criticized the application of my Social and Emotional Learning expertise by using a misinformed understanding of both, what SEL is and the strategies that we put in place in Natick to support our students’ social and emotional well-being. SEL is one of our district’s four strategic goals, which I have the privilege to oversee. Under this goal, we are developing a K-12 SEL framework that identifies specific social and emotional standards across five different SEL competencies (self-awareness, social awareness, responsible decision-making, self-management, and relationship skills) for each grade. The framework guides teachers on how to meet these standards by integrating evidence-based SEL practices into academic instruction across various subjects (e.g., math, literacy, social studies), as well as school-wide practices. For example, both our middle schools and high schools have been focusing on ensuring that every single student has a positive relationship with a trusted adult in the building—a critical element for supporting students’ wellbeing and academic achievement according to research. Our model in Natick was recently cited as a model for the state in a Department of Education publication on the topic. Since the pandemic first entered our town, we have ensured that teachers continued to focus on these social and emotional skills through various means including creative strategies like drive-by parades and through office hours. At the high school level in particular, we ensured that our students continued to be connected to their peers and educators through extracurricular activities. Lastly, as a district we ensured that students’ mental health continued to be monitored, and that any student struggling received the mental health supports they needed from our counselors. Though this was of course a collective effort, I am proud of the extensive expertise and time I contributed to help our district address our students’ social and emotional wellbeing and mental health, during an unprecedented and challenging time.

Second, this candidate also criticized the hybrid model we are using in our district during the pandemic, particularly at the high school. As a district, we were presented with various models for how to educate our students during a pandemic—none of which had been evaluated or researched. We examined each of these models in close collaboration with public health experts, including those at the Natick Board and Department of Health. The model we selected was the one recommended to us by public health experts as the best one for reducing the risk for COVID-19 transmission. We chose this model as part of our commitment to students, parents, and educators to doing the best we can to continue educating our students while maintaining everyone’s health and safety. In fact, this model has demonstrated its effectiveness in doing just that—keeping our students learning safely. Is the model perfect? No. In fact, no model, in any district across the country has proven perfect in trying to educate children in the middle of the worst pandemic of the past 100 years. Though, we are pleased that this model continues to educate our children in the safest manner possible.

Third, my opponent criticized me and others for not “standing up” to the closing of the Johnson school by providing a false narrative and misinterpreting my role in the process. The facts of the situation are as follows: the town administration told the school department we needed to cut four million dollars out of our budget. Given that about 94% of the school budget goes to paying teachers’ salaries, there weren’t many options to contemplate without a massive layoff of teachers at a time when we needed more, rather than fewer teachers to support a challenging hybrid model. The administration proposed to the School Committee several severe cuts including the closing of Johnson. As painful as the process was, particularly to the Johnson community, we had to find ways to address this deficit before taking options off the table. After several weeks of difficult negotiations with our town partners and with the teachers’ union we were able to stave off all of the drastic cuts. Johnson remains open, and all of our students are able to enjoy extracurricular activities. My opponent criticized the School Committee’s handling of the situation, however, provides no alternative she would have proposed for addressing the difficult financial situation we faced.

Overall, I am proud of my record and experience on School Committee and the work that we have done, particularly in the past year.

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

I couldn’t be prouder of how our community came together in the face of this unprecedented pandemic. I still remember sitting in the Select Board room on March 12th along with my fellow School Committee members, and the members of the Select Board and Board of Health. We watched the chairs of the three boards, and the town’s professional leaders come together to reassure the community that we would spare no resource to take care of the community. Over the coming months, we all fulfilled this promise. The School Committee, our superintendent, school principals, teachers, Director of Health and his team, the Facilities Director and his team, and so many countless others went above and beyond the call of duty to protect our community and educate our children. The Facilities Department retrofitted our buildings with important safety precautions including hospital-grade air filters; our nurses put in place contact tracing procedures and now pool testing; and our teachers re-invented instructional practices to fit into the new virtual/hybrid context. I am also proud of the role that I played as part of this amazing team. As a member of the Re-opening Committee, I worked closely with the superintendent to elicit parent feedback, analyze and organize/present data from responses, examine public health research to ensure student safety, and ultimately approve our re-opening plan. In addition, I continued to advocate for special education services. I spoke with many members of the special education community, including our SEPAC leaders, to better understand the challenges our students and parents were experiencing this fall, communicated them to the superintendent and her team, and advocated for changes to improve services.

Furthermore, everyone involved, including myself and the rest of the School Committee, continuously gathered feedback from the community through both formal and informal ways, and found ways to improve educational services. Furthermore, we continued to contend with shifting guidance and regulations from State and Federal education and health agencies. This has been a dynamic process to continuously enhance education in this unprecedented context. All in all, we have much to be proud of how we handled education in Natick in midst of the global pandemic.

Describe the other issues that define your campaign platform.

As mentioned above, one of my main priorities as a School Committee member is to ensure our schools are promoting equity and inclusion. I define equity in education as making sure every student gets what they need to succeed, and inclusion as making sure every student, teacher, and parent feels welcomed and supported in our schools. As a parent of a child with special needs I’ve suffered seeing my daughter excluded because of who she was, and I am committed to doing everything I can to make sure that experience isn’t repeated for any student or adult in our schools. Beyond just words, my commitment to equity and inclusion means promoting best practices in education, including professional development for teachers on implicit bias and culturally responsive instructional practices; teaching students about the role of the active bystander in reducing microaggression, bullying, and other exclusionary behaviors; and hiring and retaining more diverse educators.

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

My accomplishments include:

• Overseeing progress on the district’s social and emotional learning goal as a School Committee member
• Earned a doctorate in education while raising my two children with my wife
• Lead my organization’s work on the School Health portfolio, including projects funded by the US Department of Education, state departments of education including MA DESE, and foundations across the country.
• Published various academic journal articles and book chapters related to education (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Shai-Fuxman)
• Presenting my work through several media outlets including WGBH, boston.com, and the Boston Herald (See: https://www.shaiforschoolcommittee.org/in-the-news)
• Chaired Natick’s Special Education Parent Advisory Council, as well as co-chair the Massachusetts Special Education Advisory Council (a position I continue to hold)

The best advice ever shared with me was:

Always be true to yourself and to your values.

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

First of all, thank you for reading this far! Second, I kindly ask for your vote on March 30th (or before by mail). I first ran for School Committee to serve my community the best way I know how—through my passion and expertise in education. It has been an honor and privilege to serve Natick in this role and hope to have the opportunity to continue to contribute towards strengthening our children’s education. If you have any questions, feel free to reach me at: shai4schoolcommittee@gmail.com