What is your connection to the Tosa community? 

 I’m a lifelong Tosa resident. I was born and raised in Wauwatosa.  I went to Roosevelt, Longfellow, then  East. My brother went to  Roosevelt, Longfellow, and then he went to Tosa West. And then my child went to Roosevelt, Longfellow, then  East. And then, while my child was a student in the district, I was a very involved parent. I was a room parent. I was a PTA mom. I planned their fifth and eighth grade promotions. I was a member of the band boosters, the band boosters board. I sat on the friend of the theater arts board as well as I was a volunteer for many of the field trips, including the ninth grade band trip to Ireland. I also sat on the task force a couple years ago that helped to rewrite the curriculum for the human growth and development curriculum, and then currently, I’m also a member of the Wasa Women’s Club, and I sit as a member of the fundraising committee there. So I’ve been in tosa my whole life except for the eight years that I was in Madison as a student at UW, and then living there for a little while. I’ve been in Tosa my entire life.

Why are you running for school board? 

So it’s gonna sound a little cliche, but I want to make a difference. I work in the nonprofit industry. I’ve worked in the nonprofit industry my whole professional career, and I was raised by a nurse and an educator, and I’ve just been taught to make a difference in my life, no matter how big or how small it is.  I want to be that person that helps the district continue to succeed in what it has done well, and then at the same time, identify where we can continue to improve, because I think there’s things that we’ve done very well, and I think there’s things that the district can improve on. I also think that with my professional background, like I mentioned, I work in the nonprofit industry, I can bring a unique voice to the board. I have a strong background in strategic planning, financial management and data divot data driven decision making.

What are some things that you think that the school board has done well? 

I think that our board really works well with our schools, especially when it comes to, like, promoting our arts programs. We have such phenomenal arts programs throughout the district.I think the theater at the arts are coming back. When I was a theater kid at East the theater program at East used to be really, really strong. I think it’s really gaining momentum again.

I think that the music programs are incredible. I think the board has done a great job of promoting those. I think the other thing they’ve done a really good job of promoting is the launch program. I really want to see that program continue to grow and strive because not only is it a great connection between our district and the Elm Brook district, but it’s great. It also shows students so many more paths that they can take than just a traditional four-year college path, because students see those opportunities to explore different things, whether it’s the trades apprenticeships or a gap year, everything is so incredibly valid. So I think the board has done really, really well with that.

What is your number one priority?

 I think just talking with the community members, and when I started talking to people about why I was running and why I wanted to run, was bringing in more of the community and bringing in more of those connections. And in my professional life, I really view myself as a connector. And in all of the communities, the conversations I’ve had in the past few months, we have a lot of big voices in the community that are heard and a lot of other voices that are overshadowed or don’t necessarily get brought to the table. And I really want to bring in voices that aren’t necessarily heard, whether it be students voices or people that don’t necessarily have children in the district, whether it be retired people, or people that don’t choose, people that have chosen not to have children, or young families that don’t have children yet, that eventually may have children. Or, you know, business owners bring them all to the table, because they’re all impacted, whether they think so or not, by decisions that the board makes. So that’s a really important priority to me, whether it be through, you know, targeted surveys, or increasing the not necessarily increasing the number of Task Force and committees we have, because there’s a lot of them, but maybe changing the makeup of them and how we who we bring to the table to sit on those task force and committees, especially with the students. You know, like I said, I mentioned that I went to these conversations this week at West and last week at East. For this, these conversations about academic rigor, and they’re talking about who is on this, these task force, and I didn’t hear them once mentioned that there are students on these task forces, well, for talking about academic rigor, why are we not bringing in students to talk about the academic rigor that you are all experiencing? You guys are sitting in that you should be involved in that, and that’s so that’s probably my number of priority because that also increases the transparency of the school board.

What unique profession or personal perspective will you bring to the board? 

Professionally, I’ve served on a number of boards, not just like the theater board and the band board, but I’ve served and I currently serve on a professional board. I serve on the board of the Association of Fundraising Professionals. I’m a board member of that, and then I also co chair the Education Committee. And then I’ve served on another previous professional board prior to that. So I think that I’ll be able to easily step in, because I know all the governor board governance rules and regulations and stuff like that. So there won’t be a steep learning curve for me when it comes to that kind of stuff. There’s such a thing called Robert’s Rules of orders, where you need to learn about seconding emotion and bringing emotion to the table. So for me, that’s a really good perspective to have, that I won’t need to, you know, do all that learning. And then also I mentioned before, I have my years of strategic planning and management, along with my financial oversight and everything that I have. And then every day in my daily life, working with donors and foundations of every decision I make with that is very data driven. When I walk into a donor meeting, I’ve done hours of research on them, whether it be their donation history, not only to the organizations that I’m working with, but their other donation history. They’re called wealth screens, so I know how much they can give, or how much they might feasibly be able to give. So there everything I do is data driven, and I think that’s also perspective that I could bring into the board, because I think that that’s very detrimental in how we make the decisions on the board to the community. And then, you know, personally, like I said, being a lifelong Tosa resident, and then also choosing to move back here after Madison and raise my child in Tosa. I’m well versed in the district and you know, the needs of the overall community.

What is something in the past year that you have accomplished that you are very proud of?

In the job I was in previous to this, I was part of a large, what’s called a match campaign. So a donor gives an organization a large sum of money and says, If you raise the same amount of money, we’ll match it. And I was part of the small fundraising team. There were three of us that raised $1.5 million in three months. So I’m really proud of that, because we were able, through the stewardship and the outreach and community connections that we were made, we were able to make that match happen. So we were able to raise, in total, $3 million for that organization.

 How will you ensure students’ perspectives are represented on the school board? 

That’s something that I I took a lot of time to think about, because that’s really important to me, because students are directly affected by the board decisions, I think, more so than anybody else in the community. Yes, you can talk about the referendums and the tax base and property taxes and all of that kind of stuff. Yes, that’s incredibly important. But the board directly affects students with the decisions that the board makes. And when my child was a junior, they were a student board rep, and that was, that was wild because that was, that would have been September of 20 to 21 so that was during COVID. But honestly, I don’t know how much the board really listened to the student reps. I think it needs to go further than that, I think there should be students on every single task force, on every single commission, and not just high school students. I think middle school students, and all the way down to elementary school students, depending on what the topic is, because all perspectives are valid. Everything is incredibly valid. And I think that school board members should be in the schools and hold listening sessions to the best of our ability. And I know there’s rules around that I know we can’t, like so I said to the best of our ability, talk to the students and engage them and find out what your priorities are, what you want to see in the district, what kind of programming you want to see, what’s working well, what’s not working well, and things like that, and really try to implement those again, to the best of our ability. And make sure that the funding needs that we’re looking at meet the priorities and the needs of the student, because that’s really what matters to me, because you guys are the most greatly affected by the decisions of the board. So I think it’s very crucial to invite you to the table in a variety of ways, and I really want to help make that happen. 

Do you have any fun facts about yourself?

So this past summer, in an effort to keep up with my 72-year-old father, I did my very first mountain bike by grace. Wow, that’s cool. And I was in Wausau. And I’m thinking about doing more, because, again, I have to keep up with my soon-to-be now, 73-year-old father, it’s crazy, so I do that. And then, thanks to my amazing band director, who is one of the teachers I still keep in contact with, I have the ability to play six instruments. I think it is, an oboe, piano, mallet, percussion, clarinet, saxophone, and English horn. And then I have two cats, one named after Stevie Wonder because he is blind like like, no eyeballs at all.  And then one named Holiday after Billie Holiday. So as you can see, music is a very, very, very important part of my life.