Welcome! I’m running for the Souhegan Cooperative School Board in Amherst, New Hampshire in the March 8, 2022 election.

Amherst citizens, please vote for me on Tuesday, March 8.

My experience

My name is Elizabeth (Beth) Kuzsma and I am a candidate for the Souhegan Cooperative School Board. I would like to take a few moments to share about myself and ask for your support in the upcoming election.

I have almost 6 years of experience as a board member serving on the Amherst School Board. A few examples of my accomplishments during my years on the board are:

• helped reach a contract with our teachers after 2 years without one. That contract has already saved taxpayers thousands of dollars in retirement and healthcare costs while also providing stability and caring for our teachers.
• served on both of the hiring/search committees that brought us our stellar leadership team at Clark-Wilkins.
• been a member of the SAU Policy Committee for 3 years and been chair of the committee for the last 2 years. As chair I helped to restructure meetings to allow us to review policies in a faster and more efficient manner allowing us to get through more policies each year.
• last year alone, I cut $100k from the budget by evaluating the budget with a fine toothed comb and identified any line item that had gone up by more than $1 or was higher than the typical spending trend, I then asked the questions necessary to help the board identify which of those items could be reduced or completely removed from the budget.
• this year I encouraged the administration to find a way to keep the interventionist at Clark without adding any additional money to the budget to do so. This position, which has been grant funded this year, is important because, for the first time in my history, we have been able to provide enrichment (not just intervention) at both Clark and Wilkins. The hope is that keeping this interventionist we will be able to continue to provide enrichment for our students that are ready for it.
• before joining the Amherst School Board I was a member of the Souhegan Advisory Finance Committee.
• as Board Chair, I helped implement a monthly Letter to the Editor of the Amherst Citizen to help communicate with the public about what is going on within the district, and a board email address to make it easier to hear from residents.

Should I be elected I want to take what I have learned as an Amherst School Board member and apply that to Souhegan. I will work to create steady maintenance and funding plans for Souhegan buildings so that Souhegan does not end up in the same situation Clark-Wilkins and AMS are now with their vintage systems. I also want to help find a way to blend “who” Souhegan is as a school with the expectations of the community.

My goals

I moved to Amherst 14 years ago because of the school system. I have spent my entire life living in NH and am old enough to remember the perception of Souhegan during its early years. At the time it had an amazing reputation and a unique philosophy. Our schools still have a great reputation in the state but other schools have caught on to our unique philosophy and we aren’t always as ahead of the times as we once were.

I believe that there is a way to keep the feel of Souhegan that is so respected in the state, and combine that with the high expectations of our community. SAU 39 adopted a Strategic Vision that, in part, includes an individualized learning pathway for every student. I know that Souhegan is already piloting plans with some students but more work needs to be done on fine tuning the process and expanding it to more students.

Curriculum and instruction are two key factors in the output of students when it comes to test scores. Working with teachers to dive deeply into their instruction and curriculum can help build current best practices, find gaps in instruction, and increase student learning. This should not be an adversarial endeavor because everyone in our schools is here to help students. Working as a team (teachers and administration) we can easily become the top tier school we want to be. Curriculum needs to have a two pronged approach:

1. The team should take a hard look at current curricula in use and evaluate how they are working for staff and students. In the Amherst District, we found several years ago that the sequencing of certain curricula didn’t match the competencies required at a few grade levels. Resequencing certain units allowed for students to focus more on grade appropriate competencies rather than working either behind and/or ahead of schedule. Although high school leveling can be slightly more fluid than lower grades, a similar process should be followed there.
2. The team also needs to take a look at the quality of our current curricula. Are they outdated, convoluted, or in some other way not in the best interest of students? Even if we do like them, is there something better out there that would have better outcomes?

Additionally, instruction is a key factor in student success. This same team needs to work together to make sure that the instruction itself is having the desired effect. Working together with administration and their teaching peers there needs to be open and honest discussions about what staff sees as their challenges and what the administration, and even the Board, can do to help bring about better instructional outcomes for students.

My desire to continue the Strategic Vision

At the end of the 2019 school year the SAU adopted a new Strategic Vision for our schools. The plan was to take that plan and work with building leadership and staff at each school to figure out how each building would reach the goals within that plan. Work started but 9 months after the Strategic Vision was adopted we were hit with the global pandemic. Everyone shifted into emergency mode and focused on how to educate our students with schools closed. The following year the district’s focus was on being able to provide an educational experience that fit with each individual’s family needs at that time. The flexible schedule that allowed families to move in and out of in-person learning as quarantine or personal needs arose was not easy and took a lot of staff and administration’s time and focus. This situation provided a better experience for all of our families than our surrounding towns who were either fully remote or had a hybrid model.

Unfortunately, since so much time and energy was put into that plan, the focus on the Strategic Vision took a bit of a back seat. Despite those unexpected hurdles, milestone goals within the vision are still happening. We are piloting individualized learning pathways in every building this year while gaining understanding on what works and what doesn’t so that more students can be a part of the process next year. Plans have still moved forward in our lower grades to create anchoring adults with plans to move them into multi year programs next year at the middle school.

Now that we are moving out of “survival mode” we need to get back into creating plans on how to meet the goals of our Strategic Vision. Souhegan staff and administrators need to work closely together to identify a detailed 5 year plan of when and HOW they will begin to meet each goal. Part of this plan also needs to include key check-in points along the way they will make sure they are on the right track and are gaining what they had hoped out of each goal.

Learn more about me and the other candidates

This video from the AAUW candidate night shows the candidates for all open positions introducing themselves and responding to public questions. Town positions are first and school board positions begin at about the 59 minute mark (Souhegan first, then Amherst).

Connect with me

Have questions? Please reach out to me on Facebook.