Shrewsbury 2022 Candidate Profile: Sanam Zaer, School Committee

SHREWSBURY, MA — Shrewsbury will get at least one new school committee member after the May 3 town election.

Sitting member B. Dale Magee is not running for reelection this year, although incumbent Lynsey Heffernan is. That leaves at least one open spot on the committee for a new member to pick up. Three non-incumbents — Erin Boucher, Jennifer Luke and Sanam Zaer — have signed up to run this year.

In advance of the election, Shrewsbury Patch asked each candidate to answer our questionnaire to help voters get to know them better. Here's how Zaer responded:

Why are you running for a seat on the Shrewsbury School Committee?

I am running because I care about our students and schools and can be a valuable asset to our district’s leadership team. I have a Master’s degree in Education, classroom experience as an English and English Language Learner (ELL) teacher, and am currently serving as the Director of Elementary & Middle School for a local private school. In addition to my professional experience, I have actively volunteered throughout our district and in our town in multiple capacities.

Through my current role as a school administrator and through my volunteering experiences, I already have working relationships with many of our district leaders. I am also heavily involved in local advocacy work and consistently coordinate efforts to educate and empower members of our community to engage with local government. I believe a School Committee member is primarily an advocate, and I would use my position to amplify the voices of students, parents, and educators across the district to strengthen the world class education that Shrewsbury provides to our students. Through serving on the School Committee, I would also hope to encourage new and diverse voices to engage with local government and seek leadership positions in our town.

What's the biggest issue facing Shrewsbury Public Schools and what would you do about it?

The biggest issue facing our schools currently is a communal mental health crisis that is impacting both our students and staff members. We have some wonderful resources in place for our students, such as our school adjustment counselors, the BRYT program, and our partnerships with Shrewsbury Youth and Family Services and the William James INTERFACE referral service. I fully support and commend all current efforts being made by our administration and am happy to see us expand all of our existing services. What I offer the School Committee is my insight into potential blind spots. As a parent, a foster parent, a teacher, and a school administrator, I have navigated a very wide range of social services both within our schools and outside of them. One big issue that is not unique to Shrewsbury is our very limited number of bilingual and/or culturally competent mental health professionals, which is a sometimes invisible problem to people who are not specifically looking for it and impacts some of our most vulnerable students. This can be potentially addressed by prioritizing staff diversity, cultural competency, and language fluency in our hiring process.

DESE lifted its mask mandate in February, but coronavirus continues to circulate. Would you support bringing back a mask mandate? Why or why not?

I would rely on public health officials and our existing institutions to guide the School Committee with making a decision like this. The previous mask mandate in Shrewsbury Public Schools was guided by the CDC, DESE, our local Board of Health, and the Federal Department of Transportation. If any of these institutions put such a mandate in place, I would support it. Likewise, I would not support a mask mandate if all of these institutions lift their mandates and no longer advise the use of masks, unless there was a strong consensus from our staff members that we should keep one in place. In addition, I currently oversee the Covid testing at the school I work in and am impressed with the resources offered by the State to prevent and mitigate the spread of Covid-19. We are far from where we were when the pandemic started and have a lot of tools in place to combat a potential surge, which our school administrators, staff, and School Committee have navigated well over the past two years.

If you could snap your fingers and fix or change one thing in the school system, what would it be?

If all it took was snapping my fingers, I would change how schools in the United States are funded in the first place and permanently detach them from property taxes. This is an outdated and inequitable way of funding schools for multiple reasons. First, with the current system, wealthy municipalities are able to provide more resources to their student population than neighboring ones. All students deserve access to the same programs regardless of the city or town they live in and regardless of the average property value of their neighbors. Second, we have a growing population and the burden of even minor property tax increases to adequately fund school programming disproportionately falls on our less affluent residents including the elderly. This prices out people who cannot afford these increases and further segregates our State by socioeconomic status. Ironically, this also prices out many of our educators who cannot afford to live in the town they teach in. Moving away from this system and implementing one that is rooted in equity to ensure that all children have access to high quality education regardless of where they live, is a moral imperative that is long overdue.

Related: Shrewsbury 2022 Election: See Who's On The Ballot