THE MALDEN ADVOCATE - Friday, August 25, 2017
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SCHOOL | FROM PAGE 1 she supports the idea of quarterly meetings that bring together both sides of city government. “When your schools succeed, your community succeeds,” said Orsino who is particularly concerned that the city’s rush of residential development will lead to a spike in school enrollment. “We are better off as a community and
as a city if we work together.” Spadafora has toyed with the idea of running for several years and when the Ward 3 seat opened up, she decided it was time. As a mother of two kids in city schools and one graduate of Malden High, she has plenty of experience as a parent involved in the district. She is especially interested in boosting Malden’s special education program and ensuring all students and teachers
have the support and resources they need to succeed. “Malden has a fantastic special education program,” she said. “But I would like to look at the number of kids being sent out of district and what we can do about that.” Smith was primarily focused on building her career in education until last November. “I was inspired by the 2016 election to get more involved in my community,” she said.
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“Thinking about my skill set, and talking with friends and neighbors who encouraged me, I decided the School Committee was the place where I could use my experience and skills.” A former first and second grade teacher, Smith has also coached K-12 teachers in Boston and surrounding districts. She co-created a highly-rated diversity series for Massachusetts teachers and has been a longtime member of Teach for America, a non-profit organization that recruits people to teach in low-income and underserved communities. Last year, Smith earned a master’s degree in education policy from Harvard Graduate School of Education and she now works as chief of staff at KIPP Academy, a charter school in Lynn. “I am an advocate of public education and I go where people are dedicated to serving kids,” she said. “Charter schools and district schools are facing a lot of the same challenges. We have to work together because we are educating the same community of students.” A former special education teacher, Orsino now works as project management consul-
tant for both large and small businesses. Her experience managing budgets and working with diverse groups of people are some of the professional skills she brings to the race. “We have amazing schools, the educational opportunities are stunning,” she said adding that the school committee needs to make sure that teachers and staff have the support and resources needed to do their jobs. Her approach to managing school spending is to leave existing school program and services in place and instead look at operational efficiencies. Orsino also believes it’s important to draw the community into discussions about school budgets and policies. “We need to include all voices,” she said. “People say the school department doesn’t matter to them because they don’t have a child in the system. But it does matter. This is the future of Malden and it’s important that everyone has a voice.” Orsino is also concerned about out-of-district placements for special education students and said there may be opportunities for Malden to build its own special needs programs and draw students from other cities and towns. Spadafora brings with her 18 years of experience working in in the financial and banking industry, and is now a member of the controller’s department in a private investment bank. “I have a background in finance that I believe will be helpful with school budgets and with maintaining our buildings and facilities,” she said. Beyond budgets, Spadafora is concerned about some of the trends she has seen in public education. “I am 100 percent worried that schools are being driven by testing,” she said. “We need to focus on the quality of learning, not on test scores.” She also feels that highstakes testing has led ele-
SCHOOL | SEE PAGE 14
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