I spent 17 years in the profession, serving 10 years as a classroom teacher and 7 years outside the classroom in several leadership roles. In 2012, I was proudly selected as one of 6 county teacher of the year finalists while teaching at Stone Middle School.  Throughout my career I proudly served at 4 middle schools and 1 high school, in various capacities.  Since 2020, my company was awarded a contract to serve as the ad agency for Brevard Schools. To date we have raised nearly one million dollars of unrestricted funds. My collective experience as a professional educator and business owner makes me uniquely qualified to serve as the District 4 Board Member. When elected, I will work hard to use my previous experiences to help shape a positive educational experience for our county's students and their families.

The system we have for funding public education has been broken for a long time. The bottom line is that no matter what changes we make to the budget, if we start with too little, we can never really make necesssary changes. Education is an investment, not an expense. To change the trajectory of our school system, we have to look towards alternate sources of funding, in addition to what the Federal Government, State Government and local taxes contributes. Brevard County, also known as the Space Coast, is full of reputable industries acoss Big Tech. We have NASA, tech companies, Patrick Air Force Base, defense contractors, and many other prominent industries in our back yard. I believe we can form strategic partnerships with organizations and companies that have a vested interest in the community we share. If I were elected as a School Board Member, I'd look to engage in dialogue with local companies to see where we may be able to find some common ground. If we can work together with local industries, we can forge important partnerships that can change the landscape of public ed. Tax Referendums and tax cuts alone are not enough. It's time to get all the smart people in our community together so we can brainstorm creative ways to fund the most important institution in our nation. We can no longer be complacent with the status quo.

Mental Health needs to be prioritized. I feel as though school districts have implemented reactionary policies to this tragedy. Greater security, more fences, and more secure facilities are all important, but these measures have been expensive and have failed to address the real problem, which happens to reside inside the walls of our schools. Nearly all of the school shooting tragedies that our nation has endured involved student perpetrators. Rather than spend millions of dollars on more gates and bullet proof glass, we need to provide more mental health resources to our students. We need to be proactive, and not reactive in how we address mental health in our nation. We need more human resources and programs that serve to address the root of the mental health crises. Much more work needs to be done in this area.

It is absolutely imperative that all stakeholders address the elephant in the room: Declining student enrollment. School budgets are determined by student enrollment, and when that number is declining consistently, we must act. In fact, this is the most important issue that faces public education today. If measures are not taken to attract more families to enroll their children in public schools, then public education as an institution is in dire straits. Public schools need to do a better job in projecting the positive facets of receiving a public education. Marketing services are never in the budget, and it is time we make room for it.

All large government organizations have areas within the budget that could be better spent. I think we need to evaluate the budget with much greater scrutiny, and begin to make decisions on large expenses that we have just taken as status quo. Just because education is data driven, this does not mean we always have to spend millions of dollars on software subscriptions that exploit this reality. BPS has made many mistakes over the years in the purchasing of unnecessary, expensive subscription based software. We ought to push back more on areas of the budget that we as a community feel do not help our students. I'd like to take a greater look at how much money we spend on testing resources and test administration. This is an area we could push back further and make sure that the contracted vendors provide more support. On the flip side, we have to evaluate where we are spending too little money on. Technology is an ongoing expense that needs to be worked into the budget. When the COVID Pandemic happened, it exposed our schools as being ill prepared to deliver online learning. Now we are losing students left and right to schools that offer online, home school options. We need to make sensible decisions on the budget and reshift our spending to priorities that will yield us a greater return on our investment.