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Green Party Candidate:
Amy Vas Nunes

Windham Board of Education

Candidate Statement

HI! I am 49 years old and have been a Northeast CT resident for over 25 years. Last year I bought a home in North Windham. I am a certified teacher at the Masters plus level in Special Education, Science and Regular K-6 grades. I have an MSE in Environmental Science education, I taught in New Haven schools including an Arts Magnet school and, locally, with younger children at a Montessori school. For a decade I worked in Willimantic at United Services as a Parent/Child Advocate. I recently started working at the WRCC Windham AIDS program as the Children's Case Manager. I am almost bilingual and love to travel. I have been with the Greens since their inception in CT in 1996.

I am interested in recruiting and maintaining, with competitive salaries, more Latin and African American staff, and believe all positions should receive a living wage. Given my teaching background, I am interested in both new Magnet schools. I am a proponent of experiential education and think we need more environmental and ecology studies for our future good. Given the events of Sept. 11, I would stress Peace education/ anti-violence/ anti-racism/ anti-bully curricula such as the ADL and Teaching Tolerance use. The high drop out and teen pregnancy rates disturb me. I think we need realistic HS student expectations and comprehensive women's health in the school clinics. Finally we need to decrease the amount of testing and not include our special and bilingual students in these figures to artificially lower our town scores.

Issues:
The main issues I hope to address are: 
(a) more recruitment and retention of Latin and African-American teachers to better reflect our community;
(b) tactics to lower the high school dropout rate--examining credits, attendance, and zero tolerance policies;
(c) no use of special education and English as a Second Language test results in Town Scoring;
(d) Bully/anti-violence/peace education at all grade levels;
(e) outreach projects with surrounding suburban/rural towns and student exchanges;
(f) enlarge school health clinics' role to include dental services and high school women's service/birth control;
(g) increase the Compaņeros program.

Contact:
amyvasnunes@snet.net 
1-(860)-456-8133

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