Focus On Education A2 Endorsement

Dear Carolyn,

Thank you for the thoughtful, deeply informed interview you gave our committee. After careful consideration, Focus on Education A2 is pleased to endorse your candidacy for the Ann Arbor Public Schools Board of Education.

Few candidates bring the breadth of firsthand experience you do from teaching at Community and Pioneer, to serving as a high school principal, and tutoring. We were impressed by your detailed knowledge of topics such as the limits of the MASB rubric.  We also appreciated the level of detail you shared when sharing how you managed statewide professional-development grants to prioritize scarce resources against competing needs, and how you connected it directly and specifically to Ann Arbor’s current budget picture, down to per-teacher spending figures.

We were especially struck by your account of leading a diversity and inclusion initiative as principal. The example you shared about bringing in outside facilitators, training student leaders, working through real community resistance and parent concern, and ultimately seeing a measurable, sustained drop in discipline incidents was inspiring. That is genuine, evidence-backed consensus-building under difficult circumstances. We also respected your account of speaking up at a union strike-vote meeting to question the strategy, despite your own long history as a union member and representative. To us this was a clear example of independent judgment, offered with real empathy for the colleagues who disagreed with you.

We’re excited to keep working with you on several of the priorities you raised. In particular, we’d welcome continuing to engage with you on: reforming the superintendent evaluation framework around the specific, outcomes-based goals you described; reviving structured, community-selected standing committees (on technology, on budget, on diversity and inclusion)  along with open board study sessions where members can develop working relationships before formal votes; restoring a stronger teacher and content-expert voice in curriculum selection; and exploring ways to make board meetings more physically accessible to the community. Your focus on chronic absenteeism and student disconnection as a root cause is worth investigating, rather than just a symptom to manage, is also an area we’d value supporting.

As part of this endorsement, we'll be actively supporting your campaign. We'll be running ads featuring your name, including in the Ann Arbor Observer, and we'll be encouraging our members to donate directly to your campaign. If you have lawn signs available, we'd love to get a batch to distribute to our members to place around Ann Arbor, just let us know how to get some and how many you can spare.

Congratulations, and thank you again for putting yourself forward for this community.

Regards,
Focus on Education A2 Endorsing Committee

Link to Board of Education Candidate Report Card: https://focusoneducationa2.org/foea2-in-action-2026