[Kathleen Cullinane]: Hi. Good evening, everyone. My name is Katie Ma Cullinane. On the ballot, it's Kathleen Cullinane. Most people know me as Katie. I grew up in Medford. And I am one of seven. The Ma's go back for a long way. But I went through the school system. I went to the Dame School. From the Dame, I went to Lincoln Junior High, where I met my husband, Scott. And from there, I graduated Medford High School, class of 1989. My husband graduated 1989 also from the Medford Vocational School. From there, I went to nursing school, Library College in Boston. And I worked in the nursing field for years. I also got married to my husband. We have three children. And with that, I'm a mother of three, Mary, Kate, Megan, and Liam. And I've seen our community transform from small neighborhood schools into the 21st century. And we have better facilities, stronger core for the education. We've had technology updates and community outreach. However, despite all these changes, there's always room for greatness and improvement. Mary Kate and Megan are attending college right now. My son, Liam, is a senior. Throughout Mary-Kate and Megan's career in the academics of our school system, they struggled. But with that, they were able to achieve what they needed to do to get to college. They were on IEPs, which is an early individualized education plan. But I was a strong advocate to make sure that they were able to move on and be successful and attend college right now. As far as special education, like I said, I am a strong advocate. And there's a lot of programs that we could do to make our school system much better. As far as special education, there is most people, I'm not sure if you know this, 20% of the Americans who have a disability, which means that one fifth of our population you know, needs money. So we need to advocate for that. So one-fifth of the budget should go towards special education. Also, we are coming into times where social emotional learning is a big thing within our system. And there are some programs out there as far as Open Circle, which is a research program. that I know is done in other school systems, which would be great if we could have that in our approach. Like I said, we also have the opioid crisis right now, which maybe we can revamp our DARE program. As of before, we used to address the current issues, and our issues have changed, obviously. possibly do community partnership with our police officers and revamp everything. For example, the drunk driving issue was the big issue back when I was in school. But as of now, in a whole, we had 250 drunk driving death related deaths with the drinking and driving as compared to 2,500 10 years ago. Our new focus is marijuana. the opiates, and we need to change our program as far as being more aware and not being afraid to have different programs within our system. Cultural enhancements, we face changes every day. The demographics of Medford are changing. We need to keep our city alive. As far as when I grew up, we always took field trips to the Royal House. That was big. And the Paul Revere run, which is in April, Patriot's Day, he would come down Main Street, stop at the Craddock Bridge. We need to keep that alive. We need to enhance what we have within our city to make it better, not to just learn about everything else. We need to keep Medford alive. Medford's a great city. Like I said, I've grown up here my whole life, stayed here, was educated.
[Kathleen Cullinane]: And thank you. I'm a little bit nervous. I've got to be honest. But I appreciate your vote, November 7th. And thank you again. I appreciate everything.