Interview: Jonathan Greene
NEWTON, MA - August 26th, 2025
On your campaign website, you cite your business experience and building a vision for organizations. How would you build a vision for NPS?
Building a vision for NPS fundamentally has to start with listening to voters and parents, and understanding what we want happening in the schools. What kind of a relationship do we want the schools to have with the city, School Committee, Mayor’s office and everybody else? Voters I’ve met with while campaigning are clear on some very basic points. They want their kids, their grandchildren – and many even want the kids who live next door – to get a world-class education that prepares them for what’s coming next…whatever it is that they want to do.
I’ve tried to reflect that directly in my priorities: curriculum, exceptional teachers, making sure that we’ve got social and emotional support.
Expanding on the phrase: What do you mean by “coming next”?
What is it that students want to be when they grow up? Making sure that we’re empowering kids who want to go to college, or want to be in the trades. One of the most pernicious things that’s happened in our national debate over the last 20 years has been the use of trade school as a slur in certain contexts – a way to imply that certain students’ ambitions are less than others. We should be meeting students where they are, and providing them the opportunity to thrive.
What were your views on the highly debated budget process last spring, and if you’re elected, how do they inform how you’ll think about future budget issues?
I actually take some optimism in that budget conflict. I think it demonstrated that as a city, we could have a really difficult conversation, and we can find a way to a better outcome.We went through this difficult budget process. The Mayor, the School Committee, the Superintendent …everybody was at odds. It ended up in front of the City Council. But in the end, we got to a place where we found a way to fund the vast majority of what the Superintendent asked for, and made clear what is needed in order to maintain the service we want for our kids. We need to build on that as we move forward, have a difficult conversation, and make it clear that we need more funding for the schools. I’m hopeful that our next mayor will engage in some of the broader ideas around how we look at pensions and other funding opportunities within the city.
So to distill that: Last spring’s process was messy, but ultimately worked. That resulted in Anna Nolin’s “Level Service+” and not her Thrive budget. You also said, “We need to find more funding going forward.” Could you connect those dots?
Going forward, as we want to add more services or more capabilities in the school, that is obviously going to require more funding. The conversation around how do we change – around changing how quickly we’re paying down pension obligations – I don’t imagine that that’s going to be an easy conversation where someone picks up the phone and it’s done. That’s a discussion we’re going to have to have as a city. A future conversation is whether we need to revisit an override. I don’t imagine that that’s going to be an easy conversation either, but we can do it if we’re committed to having it.
If someone on the City’s pension board were listening to this, they might react to that by saying, “that’s not a City conversation, that’s my decision.” How would you respond to that?
I believe that as adults working in the city, across all parties, we can find a way to get where we need to go. My understanding is that is a more dynamic concept than just the pension Board makes a decision. There’s folks in this process on the pension Board and in the City’s Comptroller office who are much closer to the mechanics of how these things work than I am, but I absolutely would engage in that discussion.
On your website, you talk about being diagnosed with dyslexia while you were in NPS. Special services is a big part of the budget. If elected, how does your personal experience inform your approach to special education?
My personal experience has a very happy outcome. I have a career, a family, I’ve got kids back in public schools. All of that has been a good outcome. However, that was something that required engagement from me, from the schools, and definitely from my parents. That outcome would not have been the same if my mother hadn’t intervened in my education to make sure that the bar was held high for me, and to get the support to get over the bar, as opposed to lowering the bar. We should never be lowering any bar for a student because they need more support. We should be providing support so that they achieve their ultimate potential.
I also think that a public school is not this thing where you send your kids off, schools educate them, and you get them back later.The data is quite clear that public school is at its best when parents are engaged, when schools welcome that and create the transparency so that you can have these conversations.
So in particular with respect to Special Ed, it’s important that we’re providing transparency for parents. Nothing gets everybody out of whack faster, or breaks the incentives and the system faster, than when parents don’t feel that they can trust the information that they’re getting from schools, about how their kids are performing, and what opportunities are available to them. From talking to current special ed parents, it’s not clear that we’re prioritizing transparency consistently across the system, in a way that allows parents to collaborate effectively. That’s a priority for me, because transparency also keeps you from getting into this colossally expensive place down the line, where people don’t trust the system, so they request aides, and here we are.
What is an example, either from your own experience or others, where parents of special education students are not fully confident in the information that they’re getting from NPS?
I have spoken to parents in the community, some I know personally, who said they have difficulty getting clear, consistent, straightforward answers from the schools about how their kids are progressing in the classroom. By contrast, I also have a close friend from high school who is a special ed coordinator at one of the elementary schools. This gave us the opportunity to reconnect. When I talk to her about how the process works in her department, a lot is focused on making sure that you’re communicating with parents. And I have heard that from constituents, voters, and parents; from talking to educators about when it works well. And I would say from my own experience, by the time I reached middle school, I got relatively little support. That was my desire. I wanted to be back in the classroom with my peers learning at that rate, and if there were things that I missed, that was okay, and that was the choice that I made, and it was the choice that my parents made.
As a parent, how did you experience the teacher strike, and if you’re elected, how does that experience inform preventing another one?
I think voters know that the relationships – between the School Committee, the Superintendent’s office, City Hall, teachers, the union, the state union, – broke down in the city of Newton over the last several years. Post COVID through the teacher’s strike, those relationships were not working properly, and nothing made that clearer than the strike that kept kids out of school for over two weeks. I look at that, at myself, at the city, and at everybody involved in leadership. That is a universal failure of leadership. Like Newton can’t keep its kids in school? What are we doing here? First and foremost comes relationship building, and recreating the trust lost since COVID between all of those parties since COVID. We’ve made a lot of progress there, right? When you talk to the current members of the School Committee, to the superintendent, and even with some teachers, you hear we are in a different place now versus two years ago. A sense of trust, value, and respect came out of that budget fight. I’ve spoken to a lot of teachers who looked at what happened in the strike, and the way the School Committee conducted itself in the strike, and said, “Geez, I feel no respect here.” A year later, they saw the school Committee fight for funding with City Hall and City Council, and they said, “Oh, now I see the respect.” It’s important that we continue building on that. I also believe very fundamentally that it’s important we have a separation of powers between the School Committee – one of whose four primary functions is negotiating the contract with the teachers union – and the union itself. That is particularly important in a moment in time when the Massachusetts Teachers Association has said they will spend a million dollars through a collection of PACs in local School Committee races. So I believe in educators, I support the union, but I believe in making sure that we’ve got the right separation.
You referenced a separation of powers, can you clarify what you meant by that?
I think it’s important that people on the Committee represent voters, that they represent parents, and that they represent the city when we’re negotiating a contract with the teachers union. Those obligations to the voters, to students, to parents, and to the city, come before any obligation to the union.
What about an educator in the union who is also a Newton resident?
I don’t have any issue with an educator in the city who is also a union representative. I am candidly concerned, though, that my opponent launched her campaign with three other representatives, a couple of whom had written positively about the impact of strikes on communities.
On your website, you say that Newton should be the employer of choice. What does that mean?
It means that if you’re a public school teacher in Eastern Massachusetts, we should be the first place that you want to come work. That definition of being the best place to build your career goes beyond headline salary numbers. It’s an inclusive concept of making sure that benefits are compelling and competitive, that teachers have the right resources and curriculum in the classroom, without feeling like they need to do a second job in curriculum content. It’s about making sure that we have the right social emotional support in the room, and the right professional development opportunities. That has come up in Dr. Nolin’s entry plan, as well as in the union negotiations – that Newton consistently failed over the past years to invest directly in those things. We’ve diverted money elsewhere.
Being employer of choice, in my opinion here and in my business experience, is a holistic concept that requires a balanced approach to how we invest in the schools, teachers, and kids. All of those things are part of the experience of working in schools.
Administrative changes to NPS’s DEI office occurred this past spring. If elected, what do you think, if anything, DEI should be at NPS? How does that translate to the student experience?
Adam, my son, who’s a rising fourth grader at Bowen, is lucky to attend one of the more socioeconomically diverse elementary schools. That diversity and breadth of experience is part of what makes public education great. Our kids are all going to be adults in more than just a cross section of society that can afford to send their kids to an expensive private school. I think that is inherent to the public school experience, and part of the reason why I believe in public education.
I also believe we should be teaching tolerance in schools, and that we should be teaching an academically rigorous curriculum. It gives everybody the chance to meet their full potential. A lot of the things that Superintendent Nolin is talking about – regarding multi-tiered systems of support – provide early support to the kids to make sure that they’re achieving with their peers, before they end up in a separate program down the line. I believe that it’s part of that broader equity concept. So I guess I believe in the notion of DEI as a more holistic question of are we providing everybody with the right opportunities?
On your website, you talk about using technology to lower administrative costs. Can you give specific thoughts on that?
In her entry plan, Dr. Nolin actually called out, very specifically, the need to eliminate the “train of paperwork” that accompanies both the HR process as well as the teacher onboarding and training process. There are mountains of carbon-copy forms that we still use in the schools. No modern organization runs itself that way. I’m the chief digital and technology officer of a large building products distributor. I spend all day, every day, talking to the team about how we can make processes more efficient, by bringing technology to bear on problems just like that. They require some degree of upfront investment, but they also inevitably yield both better outcomes and lower costs down the line. I believe this is a place that I’m positioned to help partner with her and with the city on driving change.
So less paperwork, more done electronically?
Reducing paperwork is an outcome of getting everybody to a modern technology platform. On the other end of that, you have less paperwork, you have more transparency, you have less time and resources required to accomplish any individual task. It’s much easier for everybody to get their job done.
I think there’s probably a role for that to play in some of the parental visibility questions around special education and student progress as well.
In either the current or previous school committees, was there any action or direction they took that you observed and you thought to yourself: I would have done that a bit differently?
I think it’s easy to Monday-morning-quarterback. The way adults across the city led us over the course of the years that led up to the strike, the entire breakdown of relationships, that’s something that I look back on and I say, that’s disappointing.. I think everybody around the table has has a role to play in that. I don’t know that it’s helpful for me to criticize, with the benefit of hindsight,specific conversations or decisions.
On the eve of the strike, the two parties were millions of dollars apart in their positions. That seems like a math problem, not a relationship problem. So how does a better relationship solve that?
Any properly functioning negotiation has specific relationships in the background that enable everybody to close gaps. You only get to the point that you’re describing if the relationships failed earlier in the negotiation.
Anything you’d like to convey to voters about your candidacy that we didn’t get to in this interview?
I come back to focus on the Committee’s four key roles. The first is to performance manage the superintendent, the second role is to review and improve the budget, the third is to set priorities and policies for the schools, and the fourth is to negotiate the [teachers] contract. There’s obviously other responsibilities around communicating and maintaining relationships. I think I’m well suited to all four of those four of those things, as I’ve thought and traveled a lot, meeting voters and parents through this campaign, I believe more deeply than ever that policy and goal setting is about reflecting the school system, to Dr. Nolin, and to the 2,000 educators in the system. What parents and voters want from the schools for their kids. I think that’s really important, and I’m excited to be part.
