Ayesha Wilson
Register Forum (RF): What distinguishes you from the other eight candidates?
Ayesha Wilson (AW): I am a social worker, I’m the only social worker on the school committee. I’m the only union employee, and I’m the only candidate that is directly front facing with young people each and every day.
RF: And what do you mean by that?
AW: So, I am the senior teacher counselor for the workforce program, and the workforce is part of the Cambridge Housing Authority. My site is actually based at Cambridge Rindge and Latin. I am there at the high school. I see … [and] interact with young people everyday. No other candidate has that position or opportunity.
RF: How could the School Committee be more effective?
AW: That’s a very good question. I think the School Committee could be more effective by really working in partnership with the superintendent and the community around what the needs and priorities are for our young people. So in order to really do that, we have to be centering the young people’s needs, bringing more young people to the table and their families, and really thinking about our plans and goals from a community-wide collective approach.
RF: How do you aim to close the achievement gap?
AW: I think in order to close the achievement gap, we have to ensure that all of our young people can read from third grade and beyond. We need to have universal Pre-K … We need to make sure that our most vulnerable—specifically our black and brown children and children with special needs—are getting into school a lot sooner. We need to be directly hands-on with all of our young people who are not reading by third grade and beyond. We need to have intentional tutoring support and mentoring support for those young people. We also need to think about individualized success plans … If you think about an IEP, an Individualized Educational Plan, a success plan really helps in the same way. We’re identifying what a young persons’ successful plan is, and we’re working backwards. So, if a young person says, “I want to be an engineer!” or “I want to be a doctor/lawyer,” we work backwards to make sure they are set up for those levels of success. Taking those rigorous classes, thinking about internship opportunities, working in partnership with our fabolous out of school providers and with their families to think about what their future looks like as a whole, and what piece of the pie each person who works with that young person should be responsible for.
RF: That also connects to my next question, which is, how do you plan on implementing universal Pre-K in Cambridge?
AW: The thing about schools is that any school district is not mandated to educate children until the age of six. So, anything before six years old is really the responsibility of the city and not the education department. It’s really in partnership with the city to say, we need more Pre-K classrooms. Currently there is a waitlist of 300 to 400 kids, and in order to really tackle that, we need to be thinking about how many more classroom spaces we need to have in order to service the babies in our community … And we really need to think about strengthening our birth-to-3-years-old [city] department, because that’s what’s going to help us build that bridge.
We want to make sure that any child that is born in the city of Cambridge has all their resources set up, and those families have the resources that they need to help instill a really phenomenal love for education and … learning. We want to make sure that our kids have a love for reading. I can’t tell you how much I despise hearing kids say “I hate school” … because they haven’t been engaged early enough to have a joy for learning. We need to change that narrative. When I was a kid growing up in Cambridge, my K-3 education consisted of black women educators, and I had a black male principal at the Fletcher Maynard school. Because of that experience, I was in a position where teachers modeled for me the love for learning, love for teaching, and love for seeing their young people see themselves in the world of education. And I don’t think many of our kids—especially our black and brown kids—get that same experience, as well as kids with special needs. More affluent kids may have that experience, because their parents set them up in that kind of way, but … [others are] not set up for success. I think it’s really important that we build out a strong system from birth to help our young people love learning and be rigorous and joyful and take opportunities.
RF: Connected to supporting the students, how do you plan on supporting CPS’ “lack of connection” between students and educators?
AW: One way is a strong professional development. We need to make sure that educators are understanding social competency skills and social-emotional learning. We have to meet young people where they are. When a child wakes up in the morning, before they go to school, what does their morning look like? In some cases and in some households, it could be very reckless, very dysfunctional, very stressful, and that child now has to sit in front of a teacher and learn. That is a challenge all by itself.
Our teachers have to be thinking about the social determinants of life—how many of our kids might be homeless, … in foster care, have parents who are dealing with substance abuse issues, siblings that they have to take care of, mental health issues, or food insecurities. Educators have to think about this strategically and intentionally. When a student doesn’t understand something the first time, it’s not because they don’t want to understand it, it’s because their brains might be focusing on ten thousand other things. I remember that when I was doing clinical work in Boston, I worked with a young person who had an older brother in jail and a younger brother in jail … He worried about gang-related violence, about being possibly targeted, and a slew of other things. So, our kids don’t always come to school thinking, “what’s that new math concept that I learned…?” They’re not remembering the grammar and punctuation, they’re not remembering the algebra … We need teachers that are super in-tune and that know how to meet children’s needs without feeling overwhelmed about the 1-to-25 teacher-to-student ratio. We really need to support our educators and teach them how to identify young people who need more support and how to help them.
RF: What do you see as CPSD’s greatest strengths/weaknesses?
AW: The strengths of Cambridge public school[s] are that we are well resourced, we have a lot of opportunities, we have fabulous teachers and educators, we have many paraprofessionals who were students in Cambridge and are now giving back in these leadership roles or becoming educators. We need to coordinate these resources that we have. Think about the high school; all the clubs, all the sports, all the opportunities. It’s a fabulous district to be in, and we’re spending a lot of money—230 million dollars annual budget—to maintain it. With that, we need to make sure that we are coordinating all these resources intentionally with every young person… We want to make sure that the kids in every club, like the Register Forum, don’t all look the same. We want diversity throughout all our different opportunities.
Our challenges are that we don’t have a database that is universal. We don’t have a way for outside providers to know what student’s grades are and what they need. We don’t have enough follow through as kids age out of CPSD… They need a passing of the baton from high school to whatever postsecondary opportunity they choose. If they choose college: how do we hand our young people off to their institution so they feel like the support they got in high school will carry them through to college? If they choose work: how do we lend support in the quick transition to a job setting? How do we prepare young people to show up, be on time, have a smile on their face, and code-switch? I don’t think that we teach enough life skills or financial literacy … I also don’t think that we’re doing a great job at encouraging all our students to take AP courses. We need to see more black and brown students in AP classes. We need to make sure that kids really have a road map for success, and a plan. We have to start this young.
I don’t think we have a robust mental health curriculum. As a social worker, I am beyond myself at the fact that mental health is only taught in the freshman year. The growth that you go through from freshman year to senior year is remarkable. We’ve got to teach a robust mental health curriculum from K-12, every single year. I don’t want to see us lose another child to suicide. I don’t want to see us not supporting kids with severe anxiety, depression, bipolar [disorder], ADHD, whatever they might have. I don’t want to see us in a place where we could have helped if we were proactive versus being … reactive … Again, I am a product of the Cambridge public schools, so I know that Cambridge can do a lot better, but we have to do it together. That’s why my motto is Together We Are Better, because CPSD can’t operate away from the community partners and the rest of the city of Cambridge. We have to work in partnership.
As a kid who grew up in Cambridge, I participated in sports. I participated in clubs. I reflect back on Ms. Milner, [who] was my [Black Student Union] advisor back in the day! Mr. McGuinness, he was my Biology teacher! Mr. Flaherty, he failed me for that class, but he was my English teacher! … I love those educators, and when I see them today, they know that they had an impact on my life, and they know that they’re why I am still here. I’m trying to give back, because I had educators who pushed me … even … by failing me. I’m talking from my own lived experiences. Especially living in a single parent household as a first generation kid, I daily feel like I am the best candidate for the School Committee. My lived experience and my professional experience as a social worker really set me apart from all the other candidates. There’s candidates who[m] I love, but they do not have the same kind of experience as I do. And that’s what makes me truly unique.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.