Cove Davis has announced a run for School Committee. She is running for the Ward 8 seat currently held by Matt Miller and will be running against Margie Ross-Decter. Here is her announcement press release.
Cove Davis, Newton mother of two and professional educator, officially announced her campaign for the open Ward 8 seat of the Newton School Committee in the November 2021 election.
“I believe that I can bring a unique perspective to the School Committee and an expertise in education that will help improve both the NPS and our School Committee”, Davis said. “I am a life–long educator, both as a teacher and school leader, who is passionate about high quality education and the opportunities that it can unlock for students. I have been involved in the Newton community since my husband and I moved here in 2012 as part of the Memorial Spaulding PTO, The Oak Hill Park Association, and as a Newton Youth Soccer Coach. We are raising our two young sons in this wonderful community and I am committed to continuing to work to improve our schools”.
Davis added that “I have spent my professional career working to improve education for students as a teacher, principal, and now as the director of the Five District Partnership, a partnership of five districts that coordinates best practices to improve instruction and academic achievement for all students. I have spent my career working in diverse communities, and have taught in Europe and challenging urban environments in the U.S. I am an experienced leader and a professional collaborator, and I can’t wait to bring this experience to the Newton School Committee”.
Cove’s professional background includes:
● Executive Administrator of the Five District Partnership
● Principal of the Joseph A Browne School in Chelsea
● Middle School teacher and school counselor in Europe and the U.S.
● Doctoral degree in Educational Leadership from Boston University
Davis added that “I am very pleased to have the support of so many in our community (www.covedavis.com). I am looking forward to meeting people across Newton and hearing about their educational journeys and ideas to improve NPS”.
Cove’s priorities would include:
● Excellence in Education for all learners
● Successful Return to School
● Communication and Transparency
● Focus on upgrading buildings and infrastructure
For more information, please see Cove’s website (www.covedavis.com) and contact her at [email protected].
The only thing relevant to me is the candidate’s stance during and after schools were remote.
Would like this information
I’m very impressed by her background, esp. the work in Chelsea. Her wider view of public education would make her a wonderful addition to the School Committee.
Sounds like she could offer a useful perspective on the SC. I also think that the SC benefits from frequent new blood and while I’m sure Margie is passionate about the schools, I think someone with a fresh perspective and different background is a good thing. I’ll definitely be paying attention to this race.
I could not be happier to see Cove running. As a fellow Ward 8 resident, I don’t think a more qualified candidate exists for this position. After the disaster last year, we need new perspectives and a new approach to running our school system. Cove is passionate, qualified, experienced and will make an excellent leader for NPS.
In reading her priorities (https://www.covedavis.com/priorities), it is clear that her approach is the right one. We need to focus on digging out of the hole that the current School Committee created. The last thing we need is the same old people and approach that led us to many poor decisions. Voting in Cove will certainly help all of our children succeed, and to me their future is the most important thing we need to safeguard.
Her priorities are very generl and lack specifics. I think most if not all candidates would have these same priorities. I would say that all of the current SC members hold these same priorities in some form or fashion.
I would like to see more specific detail. I am sure it will come up in debates but there is no reason candidates cannot be more specific in how to achieve these priorities on their websites. This lack of detail isn’t confined to just her. Most candidates’ websites are very vanilla and have something for everybody, but there is lack of specificity which prevents voters from understanding their approaches.
So excited to see Cove running! I know Cove through school – our kids were in the same class and went through elementary school together. She’s smart, knowledgeable, reasonable, and ready to listen. Plus, her experience as an educator will be very useful. She will be a great addition to the SC!
From her website, her first priority is as follows:
“Excellence in Education for all Students- Our schools must provide an excellent education for all of our students and prepare them for their next steps. There must be a focus on challenging and nurturing our high performing students as well as supporting our struggling students, and these goals should never be seen as mutually exclusive. ”
This is incredibly important and encouraging to hear. Jobs #1, #2 and #3 for NPS should be excellence for all students. Pre-pandemic, I heard numerous anecdotes of parents taking their children out of NPS because this focus on excellence had been lost, and finding that their (private school) peers were well ahead of them academically, even at younger ages. This situation has just worsened with the pandemic and Newton’s under-performance relative to peer school districts.
There seems to be a movement around the country to get rid of things like honors math classes. I cannot emphasize how misguided this approach is. The future standing of this country depends on our ability to be pioneers in science and technology, and we have to prepare all students accordingly. Cove’s comment above is like a breath of fresh air.
As a Ward 8 NPS parent, it’s been a good few weeks. First, a nod to Matthew Miller for self-assessing that this wasn’t the right position for him for the next couple of years, and deciding not to run at a time when he was likely going to be re-elected unopposed. Probably not an easy decision to make. Now, we have a competitive race with two interesting candidates. Cove’s background looks fantastic and I’m really looking forward to hearing more from her, and what she feels NPS can do differently.
Cove’s opponent brings a lot of institutional memory and experience, and hopefully Margie will articulate why she feels the SC has gotten so far off track that after 8 years of service she felt the urgency to get back involved. It’s a discussion that wasn’t going to happen a month ago, and now it will. That’s a win.
I’m thrilled to learn that the open Ward 8 School Committee seat will have a contested race. We all win when an elective seat is contested. To the dismay of my friends who serve in public office, I always wish them contested elections. It makes them better office officeholders. It keeps them humble and it is an important reminder that they serve at the will of the voters. It also provides voters the opportunity to engage in or just listen to more meaningful conversations and discussions of critical issues.
Let the campaigns begin.
Tim – completely agreed, and it’s eye-opening that Cove having what should be a non-controversial commitment to high performing students on her website, instead feels like a courageous position. It takes a system-wide prioritization of Excellence to push the system towards higher achievement. There are many competing claims on NPS resources for other important needs that are mandated by law for the school system to provide, while there’s no legal requirement to be a top-performing district. Therefore it takes a broad institutional commitment to ensuring a culture and resource allocation aimed at high achievement. That starts with School Committee…which means it starts with Newton voters.
I hope that no candidate proposes the elimination of academic classes of differing difficulties. Most of us have had the experience of being in a class when we found ourselves either unable to keep up with the pace of learning or bored at the slow progress of study. When I taught, our English department had essentially three levels, with the majority in the middle tier. Slower learners had smaller classes and greater support (aides or supplementary sessions), and those in honors classes the steepest academic challenge.
There was no across-the-board tracking; students could be in the most difficult science class and the least difficult English, or vice versa. As a teacher I always tried to push the students in all my classes the most that they could handle in terms of work load and sophistication. Less able students, clearly, could not have kept up with my junior Honors class as we covered forty pages a night of “Crime and Punishment.” Some of the students in that class were not destined for a Calculus course. Students, to be sure, had the option to give it a try.
To me, that kind of course structure encourages excellence without watering down the curriculum. I’d be concerned if such an approach were phased out altogether in the name of some abstract notion of equality.
@Bob Jampol The current school committee has already eliminated differentiation in middle school math in the name of equity. This is the direction the district is headed, unless people like Cove win.
I take seriously anything that Bob Jampol writes, and particularly in this instance, because: (1) he’s probably the fairest, most compassionate and most humble participant on this blog; (2) his comments here reflect the views of someone who actually taught in the trenches of the Newton school system for several decades and had the opportunity to view and articulate personal experiences about conditions under which students learn and don’t learn; (3) he readily acknowledged his own learning disabilities some of which probably dovetail with my own.
During the past several years, I’ve participated in the Understanding Our Differences program where I meet with 4th and 5th grade kids to talk about the pain, experiences, strengths and hope that derived from my own learning disabilities. I try to stress four pertinent points from these experiences: (1) they should carry no guilt or shame for having been born with these difficulties, but they and I are stuck with dealing with them; (2) they will find ways to get around these difficulties given time, perseverance and patience by each student, their teacher and their parents; (3) they will discover insights and remarkable levels of creativity that so called “normal kids” often do not have; (4) They can build happy and productive lives and careers simply because the journey to get there has been so tough.
Don’t count any kid out because they can’t achieve goals and deadlines on somebody else’s deadline.
I heard Margie Ross-Decter dropped out?
The Globe has an article on the Newton races and shows Cove as unopposed. Can anyone confirm Margie’s status?