Education

The roles of City government of paramount importance are: educating our children and providing the best quality of life for our citizens in a fair and fiscally responsible manner.

Early Childhood Education
I am a major supporter of early childhood education and am pleased to serve as a member of the City’s Early Childhood Commission and as a weekly volunteer at the Hopkins House Early Childhood Center. My volunteer work enables me to better understand the policy needs of these little citizens. We must continue to work to set universal benchmarks to determine school readiness amongst our pre-school aged population. This is imperative to ensuring that the mass of our children present to kindergarten ready to learn on day one. School readiness has been linked, in a number of instances, to reducing the special needs population in our schools which in turn, is the difference between public education costing approximately $20,000 per student per year (the average student) versus $100,000 per student per year (the special needs student).

Grade School and Secondary Public Education
As a former secondary public school teacher, a current member of the Alexandria City Public Schools Budget Advisory Committee, and the chair of a literacy program housed in City’s Department of Recreation, I am a huge supporter of education. Further, I believe that our City is only as good as our public education system. As a member of City Council, I look forward to working with Dr. Sherman and members of our school board, within the confines of my jurisdiction, to support the progress of the Alexandria City Public Schools. I strongly support keeping classroom sizes small, with the smallest student-teacher ratios in the earliest stages of education. I believe that Alexandria teachers should be among the most well-compensated in Northern Virginia to ensure that we continue to attract the best teachers and a diverse field as well. I also look forward to supporting initiatives of the School Board to address the minority achievement gap, which I consider one of our greatest challenges.

Importantly, I do not believe we solve the dilemmas posed to our public education system by dousing it with more money. Instead, we must continue to examine the most efficient ways to utilize the dollars that we have. And further, we must continue to seek ways to educate parents about the most effective ways to reinforce what is being taught in our schools at home and to collaborate with them to determine the best ways to meet the needs of each individual child.

Four-Year College Education Tuition Waivers for Foster Care Seniors
I am a major proponent of tuition waivers for qualifying high school seniors in foster care in any Virginia jurisdiction to attend a 4-year public institution of higher learning in the Commonwealth. I have been pleased to work on this initiative with other members of the City’s Social Services Advisory Board over the course of this past year and as a member of City Council, would look to continue work championing this cause from our locality to those in state government for two reasons. First, it is the right thing to do. The public serves as parents to our foster children and therefore, we should ensure their education. Second, making provision for college education for qualified foster children is the fiscally responsible thing to do. A tuition waiver is not a budget outlay, and the same ensures that our foster children will be poised to add to the tax base rather than require continual government assistance well into adulthood.