Meet School Committee Candidate Sarah Carter

Sarah Carter has never run for public office, but after 30 years living in Lexington, a career in education, more than a decade as a Lexington Public School parent and extensive volunteer experience across the town’s schools, she feels running for School Committee is a natural next step.

Carter, a Lexington Public School graduate herself, has held multiple roles in education throughout her career, including as a social studies teacher and librarian at both the middle and elementary school levels, and has three children currently enrolled in Lexington Public Schools. 

When her family moved back to Lexington from the Midwest in 2011, Carter said she quickly involved herself in the schools, volunteering for the town’s preschool organization LexFUN!, as well as Clarke Middle School’s Parent Teacher Organization, the Lexington Education Foundation, and Lexington’s Special Education Parents Advisory Council. Carter said these roles have given her “insights into how the schools actually run, what day-to-day looks like from the students’ perspective, from the teachers’ perspective, from the parents’ perspective.” 

“I’ve dedicated a lot of my time and energies to benefiting the schools, and I feel like this is the natural next step where I can use my insights that I gained from all my volunteer and professional work to influence decision making on policies and budgets that have a larger impact for students,” Carter said. 

Priorities

It’s Carter’s first time running for town office (she’s also running to represent Precinct 1 in Lexington’s Town Meeting), and she hopes to push the School Committee to improve several of its traditional processes. Namely, as a School Committee member, Carter wants to put an increased focus on the district’s benchmarking process and create a more sustainable and efficient system to evaluate policies after they’re rolled out. 

“When you enact a policy, let’s build in benchmarks and metrics that we can check and see if the policy is running as intended. I jokingly say that if a teacher ran their classroom like that, without any benchmarks, or without going back and checking, they would rightly get dinged by their principal,” Carter said. She pointed to the Honors-for-All policy change at Lexington High School that eliminated leveled English classes in fall 2023 at the sophomore and junior levels as an example. 

“We need some data on this. We need more than just anecdotal evidence, and the School Committee should be the body that says, ‘We instituted this policy. Let’s see how it’s going.’”

Carter also hopes to increase engagement between LPS parents and School Committee members by hosting office hours to discuss issues in a more interactive setting than Community Speak, a portion of School Committee meetings in which members of the public can offer comments or questions to committee members.

“For many parents, by the time they’ve come to a school committee meeting to give a community speech, they are really frustrated, and they’re looking for… a response from the School Committee,” Carter said, adding that she’d also like to look into how school administrators can better respond to and interact with parents who bring up challenging situations.

Another priority for Carter is technology in Lexington’s schools. While, in recent years, the School Committee has approved an acceptable use technology policy, Carter believes there is more to the issue than how students are permitted to use technology. 

“Parents really would love more information about how their students are using technology in school,” Carter said. “I think the School Committee could be a force in town to really start a conversation about what we as a community would like technology use of our children to look like.”

Budgeting

Carter is clear-eyed about Lexington Public Schools’ budget shortfall and any spending cuts that will result from it.

“There are some cuts that are going to have to happen,” Carter said. “I think this is the reality right now, based on the economics, where Lexington is very weary, and Dr. [Julie] Hackett is very weary of asking the town to approve a tax override when the high school project is also happening.… On the other hand, as a candidate, I’m curious if we are making sure that we’re getting all the money that’s on the table.”

Lexington High School Building 

Like all of the candidates for School Committee, Carter supports the construction of a new Lexington High School to address the building’s infrastructure, security and space issues. She favors the Bloom model for the school building, which she said would “cost the least amount of money, would take the least amount of time and would be least disruptive to students.”

“We need a solution, and we need a solution in the least amount of time,” Carter said. “And I think Bloom, following the plan from the [Massachusetts School Building Authority], is the best solution.” 

Carter is also conscious of concerns that the MBTA Communities Act, which requires Massachusetts municipalities that the MBTA reaches to encourage the development of multi-family housing, will impact the size of Lexington’s school-aged population. But she says the data doesn’t indicate there will be any dramatic changes.

Because the majority of MBTA Community Act living units planned for Lexington are expected to be studio and one-bedroom apartments, Carter doesn’t anticipate the act will cause a sudden spike in school enrollment. Paired with under enrollment at the elementary school level, she said, “having more students come in would actually be beneficial to us in the long run.”

Carter said her decades of involvement with Lexington’s schools, paired with the early resignation of School Committee member Deepika Sawhney, whose seat Carter is running for, is what spurred her to run for School Committee

“I feel like I can dive into the school committee role on day one, having an understanding and a broad perspective of many of the issues that we have,” Carter said.