Welcome to my blog!

About a week ago, citizens of Natick voted me into the Natick School Committee with 1897 votes. Thank you!!!

I've spent far more days as a resident and a parent than I have as an elected official. This blog is an attempt to bridge the two perspectives.

To keep you informed
To keep me accountable
To keep all of us connected

The information I will share are things that I am processing, reading about, or considering at any given moment as a parent, resident and as an elected official. They are not the statement of the committee.

Statement on Recusal

Here are the remarks I gave last night when letting my committee know my decision to recuse: After the School Committee meeting on October 15th, several individuals wrote into the SpeakUp Natick portal requesting that I recuse myself from voting on the possible closure of Johnson. The substance of these messages, sent to the full committee, carried a familiar refrain. The messages - often using the same language – said some version of the following: Catherine Brunell should recuse herself from deliberating and voting on the closure of Johnson because she lacks objectivity, as her children go to school there and she is from that neighborhood. I asked myself the question if there was any merit to the request for me to recuse myself and started to do some research about why people recuse From what I can tell from the minutes, in Natick, It’s never happened before - not with the Kennedy, Wilson or the High School - not even for members whose children were to attend t...

Natick's Beloved Audit

The Natick Public Schools recently received the final report from the Beloved Audit- a resource made available to us in 2020 because of our participation in the METCO Program (THANK YOU METCO and ALL of the administrators who helped complete the audit!). It was developed and run by The Beloved Community . Descriptions from the Report: What is it? The Equity Audit is designed to provide comprehensive feedback on Natick Public Schools’ capacity for diversity, equity, and inclusion with all stakeholder groups. How was it developed: A group of key leaders at Natick Public Schools spent hours completing this self-study and identifying relevant data sets for each area. The Equity Audit is designed with 14 sub-standards and 180+ indicators about nearly every facet of organizational work life. Some concrete suggestions that I read in the report: /Diversity - Ask questions like who is participating and why? / Inclusion - Some are bett...

School Committee Re-Org

Next week, you will see us working on the organization of the Natick School Committee! You elected us, now we elect and appoint one another. We will select a chair and will determine the make up of the rest of the committee using or re-vising our policies. The Natick School Committee Policy Manual can be found here . (See pages 43-45 for re-organization.) The policy subcommittee met yesterday to consider revisions of the current policy including eliminating the Vice Chair of Finance position and allowing for an extension of the 2 year limit of the chair. The agenda from that meeting can be found here . The last major revision of this policy, discussed in April of 2020 , resulted in adding the Vice Chair of Finance to the committee. What makes an effective board? That's a question I've been asking others for months. Obviously there is no one answer, but here's a screen shot from a publication by the National School Board Association. ...

Next Up Natick

Search This Blog