THANK YOU

The election was yesterday and I can't believe it has already come and gone! What an amazing time this has been for me. I have done so many things I never thought I would do, I have met some really wonderful people in this town and I really loved it!!! Running for School Committee was not something I set out to do. I did it because I felt like I needed to. It is work that I can do and would really be good at. I feel truly blessed to have been able to work with some really wonderful people in these last few months.

I have to give a HUGE thank you to Tracy Hightower!!!! She is one amazing woman!!! I never could have done this without her! She kept me going in those moments when I would start to doubt myself! She also managed to do most of the PGG work while we were running this campaign, and AEF and take care of her family! I really can not thank her enough!!!

Also BIG thank you's to: Dan Kramer, my Treasurer, and his wife Debbie, Alyssa Melnick, Ruthie Killough-Hill, Jocelyn Cuffee, Stacia Ferro, Vannoch Sin, Alisa and Steve Brewer, Stephan Petrucia, Becky Demling, Erika Zekos, Bart Bouricius, all the past and current School Committee members, Mary Carey for all the great articles in the paper, MY FAMILY for letting me do this and supporting me and all of my wonderful friends who have never stopped encouraging me along the way!!!!!

To all my Facebook friends who got the word out about what is going on in Amherst, thank you all for all of your support!!!

I am so stunned, still, that I received 890 votes!!! That is really amazing to me. For someone who really came out of no where to most of this town, to get out there and have that many people vote for me!! Totally amazing to me!! THANK YOU ALL!!!! That really makes a statement. There are a lot of people in this town that want to see something different happen in the School Committee. I hope that message is heard. I may not have won, but I did really good!! I am very proud of myself. I got out there and ran for School Committee. ME! I ran against two men with their "fancy degrees" and I did pretty good.

So, I may not have won the race for School Committee, I did win the race for Town Meeting in my precinct with 155 votes (more than anyone else)!! So I will move on to that adventure for a few years. I will still spend lots of time in the school and you will probably see me at every School Committee meeting anyways. There is still a lot of work to be done outside of the committee. First, we will finish Amherstopoly and raise some good money for all the schools! I feel like we need to really focus on Community giving within and between the schools. We need to do this work now. We have a great base already set up and now we just need to focus on helping each other out a little more than we are now. This will only benefit the children in all the schools, which will in turn, benefit all of our families. Please remember we are in this together!!!

I have to congratulate Irv and Steve for their wins. I hope we will see the School Committee moving forward together, listening to the community and schools, and working towards giving our children everything they need to succeed whether it is academically, musically, with sports and just having fun and enjoying learning.

This is going to be a tough road and a lot of work needs to happen. Everyone needs to work together to come up with plans that will help ALL children in our schools. This needs to start with parents being good role models to their children. There may be a lot of changes coming and our children will need all of our support. Please remember to put them first. If you don't like the way something is working, try to find solutions to fix it! If you have some time and would like to volunteer, ask some teachers, they may need some help. Let's find solutions that work for the benefit of our kids. We can do this, together.