NTA EBulletin: October 5, 2025

School Committee Endorsements

Please vote on NTA endorsements for Newton School Committee candidates! Voting is open, and will remain open until Monday, October 6 at 5:00 p.m.

You should have received an email from the Newton Teachers Association via invitation@mail.electionbuddy.com. To vote, you click the link in the email. Once you click on the link to vote, you will have access to all of the candidates' responses to our questionnaire, and will have the opportunity to vote to endorse any of the candidates who are running. 

The Representative Assembly (RA) of the NTA recommends endorsement of three specific candidates who are running for school committee. These are Jenna Lauter Miara (Ward 5), Mali Lipchik Brodt (Ward 6), and Jim Murphy, Ward 8. 

We encourage you to vote in this election to endorse candidates. The larger the number of people who vote, the more impactful any endorsements will be.

Almost all of the candidates submitted a questionnaire. Indeed, most of the school committee candidates Marc Laredo and Chris Brezski's have endorsed also submitted submitted completed questionnaires to us. But they all stated that they did not want NTA endorsement, because, they said, this would create a conflict of interest for them. They said arises from the fact that, once elected, they would be negotiating with the NTA, and they cannot be both endorsed by and negotiating with the NTA.

None of them, however, cited any conflict of interest from having Marc Laredo's endorsement. Marc has made an endorsement of a candidate from each ward: Ward 1: Adrianna Proia, Ward 2: Linda Swain, Ward 3: Jason Bhardwaj, Ward 4: Tamika Olszewski, Ward 5: Ben Schlesinger, Ward 6: Jonathan Greene, Ward 7: Alicia Piedalue, Ward 8: Victor Lee.

The priorities of Mayor Fuller resulted in chronic underfunding of the schools, a general lack of transparency in city politics, bad faith negotiations, and a protracted strike. I believe it is a real conflict of interest for this group of candidates to accept an endorsement from a candidate who will most likely be the new mayor.

Why?

During last year's budget season, Chris Brezski and Anna Nolin publicly challenged the mayor's funding priorities, claiming that the city had the funds to do better, and that the mayor's priority was clearly not the NPS. I believe it is very unlikely a school committee comprising Marc Laredo endorsed candidates would take such a course. Rather we can expect a return to private backroom dealings with the mayor, combined with public postures of consensus and gratitude to the mayor for "giving" the schools far less than they need. 

I need to add that the endorsement of Tamika Olszewski is particularly galling. No single member of the school committee, with the exception Mayor Fuller, was more responsible for forcing the NTA into a strike and causing that strike to last far too long. Even though Tamika is running unopposed, rewarding her with an endorsement is appalling.

For all of the handwringing about how to avoid a strike in the future, returning to politics as usual is not the solution.

Educator Autonomy

We are seeing an unprecedented effort by the district to micromanage how educators do their work.

Here is but one example: in elementary schools, special subject teachers (PE Health and Wellness teachers, Music and Fine Arts teachers, library teachers) have been directed on early release Wednesdays, to set up a regular schedule for attending classroom teachers PLCs. Based on my knowledge to date, this is true as well for special education teachers, ELL teachers, and math and literacy specialists. Most educators do not see this a productive use of their tine.

There may be good reason for math and literacy specialists to attend classroom teachers' PLCs on a regular schedule. Elementary classroom teachers are drowning under the need to adapt curricula, especially the literacy EL curriculum. All of the curriculum they are required to teach entail teaching for far more time than teacher are allocated for the subject in the new block schedules. The math and literacy specialists seem to have been directed to emphasize data collection. I know this to be the case in at least one building; I believe it to be the mandate everywhere. But this focus doesn't address educators' need for support in adapting curricula to work with their schedules.

I know this is but one example of the loss of educator autonomy. Educators are experiencing loss of autonomy across the district. I share with you how one special subject teacher feels about this change:

It’s the mandate to have a meeting that is insulting. Often we would meet on these days anyway for our goals. Or I met with my mentee last year. Or I went to my other school to do extra work there. We are professionals, we used our best judgement. It’s the fact that the district doesn’t trust us to be the professionals that we are. 

There you have it: [What's insulting] "is the fact that the district doesn’t trust us to be the professionals that we are." From what I'm hearing, this member speaks for most of us.

Labor Relations

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, I will be attending and testifying in an arbitration on a grievance we filed last fall, the denial of a member's access to the sick leave bank. 

The dispute has many technical elements and we have a superb lawyer managing these as she presents our case to the arbitrator.

I don't need to go into the details here, but I would like to share a thumbnail sketch of how I view the case.

In November of 2022 of the 2022-2024 negotiations, the district introduced a proposal to restrict or limit member access to the sick leave bank. We negotiated this subject for over two years; the district did not pull its proposal from the table until January 31, two days before the end of the strike. They were dogged; we pushed back. We won.

In the fall of 2024, the district, not having success in negotiating the contract language they wanted, violated the the contract we have by cutting off a member's contractually protected access to the sick leave bank. The district seems to want to win what they could not win at the bargaining table by reinterpreting the meaning of the contract we do have so it means what they want it to mean. There's a lot at stake.

In solidarity,

Mike Zilles, President

Newton Teachers Association