In the nearly a decade she’s been a Cambridge Public Schools parent, Jess Goetz said she’s made a concerted effort to stay involved in her children’s education, from being a room parent to volunteering at free food markets.
“That’s what I believe that caregivers who can do, should do,” she said.
Now that idea’s sparking a desire to run for School Committee – along with frustration over unanswered emails to current committee members and what she calls a lack of transparency during a superintendent search process. Goetz began following the search closely nearly 10 months after former superintendent Victoria Greer was ousted. After catching up on old meetings, she realized it didn’t seem as though much progress had been made.
“That became a question of, how do we find out what to do? How do I get any information about what’s happening?” she said. “And then that pointed me to basically what has become the crux of my campaign, which is one of process, and the things that we want from a School Committee being accessibility, accountability, responsiveness, transparency … that’s what I built my campaign around, simply because upon digging into the superintendent search, it’s been really clear to me that that’s not the case right now.”
Though work has undoubtedly gone on behind the scenes, Goetz called a lack of communication to the public problematic. “If it’s not public, I don’t see how it can be community focused,” she said.
“What frustrates me the most has been the total lack of plan,” she said, pointing to a record of proposed timelines that have changed eight times since the first a year ago.
An early problem was on the bidding process to find a search firm, when none were deemed qualified, Goetz said, asserting that the district knew this as soon as April. This was “not completely in control of the School Committee members,” but they could have used the time between December and April to work on other things, she said.
“There was a bunch of eggs put in one basket of the search firm search, and it didn’t work out,” she said. “Instead of these people choosing to go out to the public … they hired another firm to help them with community engagement. We’re hiring firms left and right instead of going out and talking to people.”
If the committee had held to one timeline, there would be “some work to fall back on if and when the search firm process fell through,” Goetz said.
When community engagement was finally asked, it couldn’t have come at a worse time: June, when educators, caregivers and students were wrapping up the school year and easing into the summer.
Three finalists were named Monday by the search committee, and interim superintendent David Murphy is one of three finalists for the job. Goetz wasn’t surprised to see him on the list.
“It looks good for him,” Goetz said.
“In a perfect world, I would strongly prefer a superintendent with educational experience, someone who had been in classrooms or at least in schools for a good chunk of their career,” Goetz said. “His weakness as a candidate is his lack of school experience. His strength is seeing what needs to be cleaned up.”
When asked what one thing Goetz would bring to the committee that’s missing, her answer is simple: accountability.
In practice, this looks like “setting expectations” around responding to emails in a timely way, setting deadlines for items that committee members are responsible for – such as a superintendent search timeline. She’d prefer more “boots-on-the-ground” engagement with the community, such as attending concerts and volunteering at libraries.
“It seems weird to me to want to be on a governing body that makes decisions about schools without wanting to be engaged in schools – understand how the decisions you’re making affect schools,” she said.
Other priorities would be policies aimed at reducing screen use in schools, moving away from an “overreliance on testing and evaluation” and teaching “the untestable,” such as critical thinking and executive function.
Internally, she wants to reduce spending on outside consultants – such as the search firm for the superintendent search. “Looking within our district would be really great,” she said.
Even more important is “respect for the professionalism of teachers” and ways to “support their growth through relevant professional development.”
“For me, so much of my Cambridge public school experience has been teacher-based … That’s who I send my kids to every day. I have never had a reason to believe that there are people who chose to teach kids at this really challenging developmental stage just because they couldn’t think of anything else to do,” she said. “I don’t think people stick around unless they have a real heart for it and a real desire to work with kids, and help.”
This post was updated Aug. 14, 2025, to correct that Jess Goetz has been in Cambridge for nearly a decade.
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