total time: 4.85 minutes
total words: 53
[Aaron Olapade]: A big part of my first term in the school committee has been listening and learning how best I can support our students, the families, and the constituents of the city. At my age, I've learned that it's really important to understand where you fit in best and how you can change the current systems with what you know. And I think that the first year has been really focused on who are the key players for each respective issue that are happening to your students, to your children, to the families here in the city, and what you need as people among our community so that I can better understand how to actually support you in the middle of our meetings, in our negotiations, in our search committees, in our PTO discussions, in our city events. One of the really big things I've been super excited to be a part of is working with Medford CPAC, which is a special education parents group here in Medford, is to secure a Best Buddies program for our disabled students, our moderate to severely disabled students, and students that identify with a disability of any kind. So they feel as though they have an opportunity for people in the community to learn more about them. We have a very notable population of people with disabilities in our community, and I think it's incredibly important for us to better understand how we as people here in the city can support them in all sorts of initiatives academically, emotionally, spiritually, I think just socially as well. And so one of the big reasons that I thought this was an important opportunity is because I'm really passionate about diversity, equity, inclusion. I know that's becoming a bit of a buzzword, these days and I don't want it to be. I think it's something that we all understand is a benefit to our community and to our schools and I don't want the weaponization of that term or the intentionality of those policies to be used against our students. That's why I want best buddies here in our city. Another really big thing that I've been happy and supportive of is to be on the various search committees here in the district I think it's incredibly important that we're hiring the best people for the respective roles that they're searching for so they can then support our students better than I can in the event of someone on the school committee. We just wrapped up the athletic director search committee, which I'm incredibly excited about, to support our students there. We worked on the English learners department as our outgoing director became a new superintendent. That was an incredibly important opportunity to better understand how our students who speak English as a second language or don't speak English at the benchmarks that we're hoping for right now, how we can best support them going forward as they go through the older years of high school and so on and so forth. So that's the things I've been doing right now, is learning, listening, being better informed on what's going on in the city and our school district so that I can be better this coming term. The things I'm really excited about, things that I really want to continue to improve upon, one of the things I'm really, really excited to start that process is about dual enrollment in our schools. Other districts, public school districts in the state of Massachusetts have begun the process or have already implemented a dual enrollment program at Montgomery Hill Community College. and Middlesex Community College, a variety of the schools around the state of Massachusetts, so that our students have an opportunity. We offer trade programs here at Medford and we offer a standard, you know, the standard track academics. I also think there's an opportunity to offer college-level courses for the students who have interest in going to college but may not be positive and they want to pursue that route. So offering dual enrollment will not only give them opportunity to continue working towards their credits, but give them a taste of what it means to be a college student. That's something that I did when I was finishing up my high school years and during my gap year. It was incredibly informative for me to understand what it means to be a college student, what it means to be able to impact students that way. Understanding why taking that course was super helpful. Another thing I'm really excited about and just try to work towards is changing our process for hiring staff, full-time staff here in the city, by improving our GROs, our own internal growing rate organizational programs. I want students to understand that being an educator is a viable track. We need to give them the steps and the tools to understand better how to be in education. I think it's incredibly important we work towards opening up that conversation even more than we already are. We're seeing educators across the country becoming burnt out, leaving the profession for other opportunities, and I want us to feel like we're securing and we're supporting our staff so they feel like they can support our students. The last thing I'm really excited about is to continue working with our CPAC, working with other NCO groups to support our students in various social, emotional, spiritual programs, so they feel as though they have an opportunity to speak their minds. Students now, especially post-COVID, are incredibly different when it comes to their communication style. A lot of them are detaching or retracting from communication with their peers. Socialization, statistically, is going down right now with the spread of social media. the usage of that type of content. I want to figure out ways to improve our students' communication capacity so they know how to communicate their needs and advocate for themselves to the adults and the people in the room who can make those changes for them proactively. Those are things I'm really excited about. Thank you so much for indulging me. Thank you very much.
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total time: 4.85 minutes total words: 53 |
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