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Date: 6/21/2022
CHICOPEE – After 31 years of service, state Rep. Joseph Wagner announced in February that he will not seek re-election for the 8th Hampden District seat. His vacancy leaves three candidates now vying for the position ahead of November’s election, Ward 1 City Councilor Joel McAuliffe, Former City Council At-Large candidate Shirley Arriaga and Former City Council At-Large candidate Sean Goonan.
McAuliffe and Arriaga are Democrat candidates, while Goonan runs his election bid as an Independent candidate. McAuliffe and Arriaga will face off in a primary election on Sept. 6 before the general election occurs on Nov. 8.
Ahead of both elections, Reminder Publishing will be asking each candidate questions about their platforms. For this edition, the candidates highlight how they will approach education in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Reminder Publishing: Educational entities continue to mend the gap caused by the coronarvirus pandemic. Along with addressing COVID-19’s lingering ramifications, including learning loss, increased mental health and educational equity concerns, what are some educational initiatives that you will champion if elected?
Arriaga: Once elected, I will advocate for additional funding to help close the educational gap that we are currently experiencing. Chicopee, like many other communities, was not shielded from the effects of Covid-19. The pandemic exacerbated the cracks in our education system and community overall. If anything, the coronavirus pandemic simply shined a light on a system that was already in jeopardy. Education is the key to absolutely everything, and our children deserve the very best. That is why education will be one of my top priorities when elected.
Our teachers and school administrators are overworked and in need of support. We need to expand our current budget to hire and retain more teachers, paraprofessionals, substitutes and mental health counselors. We need to provide our school department with the tools to get through this difficult period and help them both physically and emotionally. Reducing the student to teacher ratio, managing expectations, providing teaching and learning resources, as well as technology that works, will help create a positive work environment. Additionally, we need to ensure our educators have time to do work outside of teaching, and community support.
When elected, one of the educational initiatives I will champion is the expansion of our curriculums to create more career paths for our high school students. We need to strengthen our STEAM (science, technology, engineering. arts and math) STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and technical curriculums. These are necessary for our students to succeed. By exposing them to creative processes, hands-on learning, inclusion in the classroom and increasing critical thinking, their social skills will be aided. These are some of the things that have been impacted by the COVID-19 epidemic. STEM opens opportunities and encourages girls to explore careers in the STEM field. I look to stimulate and encourage learning via methods that are proven to help our students succeed. As the next state representative, these are some of the things I look forward to advocating for in the 8th Hampden District.
Goonan: Every parent wants their children to learn about the world and live happy and successful lives. Every child has a thirst to seek knowledge and understand the world. We all want a cohesive community comprised of educated people working together to keep it functioning and thriving… So why do we continue to throw money at our broken, colossal failure of an education system? I’ve seen what goes on firsthand as a substitute teacher for the Chicopee Public School System and I respect all teachers who have tried to do their best under this defeating, frustrating system. I don’t mean to single out Chicopee schools when I speak about the failures of the education industry as a whole.
Education is dominated by compulsory government-mandated schooling. If elected I will fight to decentralize power and control away from the state (and federal) government and bring power to the community and family level by making a variety of other options available. Private schools and homeschooling need to be less regulated by the state-mandated curriculum and requirements. Standardized testing needs to be done away with. Money wasted on unnecessary administrators needs to be shifted to benefit students. Public and private education should be tailored to the expectations and needs of individual families and communities, with the state curriculum and teaching methods made more flexible.
The required six and a half hours a day, 180 days a year for 12+ years of classroom instruction broken up into disconnected 50-minute blocks is outdated and counterproductive to real learning. Many youth become disillusioned because school does not work for them, and they also may feel disconnected from the “real world” being stuck in a classroom. Also, children do better when they are self-motivated to learn, rather than forced. I think the solution is to encourage real-life independent learning, apprenticeships in the community, opportunities for community service, alternative schools, or even create dynamic school/library/community center/senior center hybrids in neighborhoods, which will allow people of all ages to have a place to learn and interact.
Solitude is also important for young people, and they don’t get enough of it, nor do they get enough quality time with family. This is why I want to relax mandatory attendance requirements and make school more flexible for families. The education industry and its politicians want to expand mandatory public schooling into the summer and at a younger age, removing children from their families for longer periods of time, yet the disintegration of the family and community over the past century is partially a direct result of removing children from the home and shifting all of the responsibility of education to the government, on top of wages being driven down and both parents being forced to work longer hours. We need to rethink what education and success really mean and break free from the common perception that this monolith of a schooling industry is the only way, and that its failings can be solved by spending billions of more dollars.
McAuliffe: One of the proudest days during my time working in the state Senate was the day that we passed the Student Opportunity Act (SOA). The SOA fundamentally changed how we fund schools in our state and means millions of dollars more to support the Chicopee Public Schools. As state representative, I’ll fight to make sure it is fully funded so that our schools have all the resources they need to educate our kids in today’s climate. That means funding for more teachers, paraprofessionals, interventionists, therapists – and more to meet the needs of today’s students.
We also know that the coronavirus pandemic has disproportionately affected students who were at the greatest risk of falling behind. Data shows that 60 percent of students at some high-poverty schools have been identified as at high risk for reading problems — twice the number of students as before the pandemic. To help these students catch up, the state must provide support for targeted interventions, particularly in school districts like Chicopee.
And if the coronavirus pandemic puts students who are already in school at higher risk for falling behind, we also know that the absence of a preschool education for kids does the same thing. Study after study shows that children who attend preschool have far better educational outcomes than those who do not. The first five years of a child’s life are the most important — and make a difference for the rest of that child’s life. Universal preschool is the single most important thing we can do to improve educational outcomes in communities and lift all of our kids up.
Here in Chicopee we have been providing preschool to a limited number of kids for many years – and soon we will be expanding those offerings to include programs at some of our elementary schools thanks to one time federal funds. But still, far too many Chicopee families are left out of this vital resource. As state representative, I will fight to make free public preschool available to every child in Chicopee. This is something we must do in our city, but across the entire commonwealth. Massachusetts started the first free public high school in the nation and it is long past time to do the same with public preschool for all.
Another issue we must tackle are the waitlists at our career and technical high schools (CTE), like Chicopee Comp, in our state. There is a skilled labor shortage across our state – in which students could graduate from high school with the skills needed to join the workforce immediately in high paying jobs that start on average at $60,000 a year with no college debt. Not every kid needs to go to college and we can address both educational and workforce concerns by expanding CTE programs and cutting down wait lists.