total time: 3.38 minutes
total words: 331
[Lisa Kingsley]: Hello and welcome to Coffee Chats with the Kingsleys. My name is Lisa Kingsley and I'm running for Medford School Committee. Over the next week I'm going to share a series of videos that give a little bit more information about who I am, my background, and why I'm running. And I'm going to be joined in these interviews by somebody interviewing me and I figured who better to start than my oldest child.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hi, I'm Lacey and I'm going to be covering the who she is part of this stuff. So I know you grew up in Kansas. How did, why did you start to live?
[Lisa Kingsley]: Yeah, so I grew up in the suburbs of Kansas city. Um, and while it was a great place to grow up, I knew that I wanted to live in a place that was a little bit larger, a little bit more diverse, had a few more differing perspectives and opportunities. Uh, so I city hopped for a while going to undergraduate at Loyola University in Chicago. Then I moved to New York City and did the New York City Teaching Fellows, where I got my master's degree in special education and became a special education teacher, first in the South Bronx, and then on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Did you meet anyone special in New York? I did. So while I was living in New York, I met my now husband, David, who was already living in the Boston area. So after a year of buses back and forth, he won the rock, paper, scissors contest, and I found myself moving to Boston.
[SPEAKER_01]: When did you decide to move to Boston? specifically.
[Lisa Kingsley]: Yeah, so we were living in Cambridge and Nathan was about six months old and we realized that we were quickly outgrowing the apartment that we were in. And so we started looking around for a house and we're so lucky to find our house near Playstead Park in 2013 and we've lived here ever since. What were your first impressions of Medford? I loved the community. So I was working at Prospect Hill Academy at the time and we had a lot of students that came from Medford public schools. I was the director of special education and what I found universally is that the people that I was liaisoning with and the people I was working with in Medford were folks I really liked talking to. So professionally, I had a lot of respect for the schools. And then I found myself in the community quickly discovering the MFN. So with a seven-month-old, the playroom and the park play groups became a fixture of our lives. And then as our family grew to include now Annie, who's 10, and Caroline, who's seven, 10 years of volunteering at the swap, four years of serving on the parent advisory board, including two years in which I was chair, I just became more and more in love with the people in Medford and the community. I then started leading Annie's, my middle child's Girl Scout troop for the last five years, in addition to coaching girls on the run and just looking for any opportunity to get involved and give back with a community that I loved.
[SPEAKER_01]: I see. So I'm guessing it was back then where you decided to run for school committee?
[Lisa Kingsley]: Yeah, so while I was doing all this stuff, getting involved in the community on a personal level, I also wanted to get involved with the community professionally. So your first day of kindergarten in Medford Public Schools was my first day as principal of the Curtis Tufts High School. So I had the opportunity to get to work within the Medford Public School system before moving on to Malden, where I was the district's director of therapeutic services and the director of their alternative high school. And then I spent my last three years, as you know, going back to school, getting my doctorate in education leadership at Harvard. So when I thought about the combination of my love for Medford and the people, my experience within the Medford public schools, but then also my deep experience in education in general, having been everything from a para-educator to a district leader to then like a systems level doctorate, I figured this would be an opportunity to further give back to this community.
[SPEAKER_01]: Awesome. We're getting a little lengthy, so I think we should wrap up, but thank you for letting me interview you. Pleasure doing business with you. And that's the first session of Coffee Chats with the Kingsleys. Tune in soon.
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total time: 3.38 minutes total words: 331 |
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