School Committee candidate Tammy Wong-Bigelow

Tammy Wong-Bigelow ran for Waltham School Committee in 2023 and wasn’t elected, but after attending a meeting earlier this year, she said she knew she wanted to join the race again.

Wong-Bigelow recalled that committee members discussed the district’s budget in that meeting but only one member pushed back against making cuts to teaching positions. She said she decided that night to run for office.

“I thought, ‘That’s ridiculous. Why is the School Committee making budget cuts and cutting teachers when we need them?’” Wong-Bigelow said.

Wong-Bigelow has been an active community member. Since moving to Waltham in 2007, she has served on the Waltham Community Playgroup board for eight years, volunteered in city cleanups and worked with the Cat Connection rescue group. 

She has more than 20 years of experience in education and has worked as an educator, education consultant, adjunct professor and teaching consultant.

Two of Wong-Bigelow’s children are students at the city’s Dual Language School, where she is an active member of the Parent-Teacher Organization.

Wong-Bigelow said she sees expanding the DLS program as a way to support the growing number of English language learners in the district.

She said she also wants to see the district hire more special education and ELL teachers to help with the influx of students and to prevent those teachers from being overloaded by their caseloads or having to split their time between schools.

Furthermore, she said she believes that sharing resources, specifically staff, between schools is not as effective as having resources dedicated to one school.

“If they have a more permanent status in the school instead of traveling around then the students can see and trust them even more and that helps with success,” she said.

Conducting school walk-throughs to make sure curriculum is visible would further support student performance when it comes to state standardized tests, Wong-Bigelow said.

“Just to see that standards are posted, objectives are posted to make sure the students really know what they’re supposed to be learning and the objectives are met,” she said, “because that’s really what those tests are about, they’re about meeting those standards.”

Wong-Bigelow said issues of equity, student performance and funding are tied together, and using available resources, like the budget, to support these needs, is key.

“School funding can help with equity in schools because of the resources that schools lack,” she said. “Funding is the biggest issue to be solved.”

In addition to school resources, Wong-Bigelow said information about School Committee meetings can be improved in both community accessibility and timeliness.

“Having a day’s notice isn’t enough for a lot of people to attend,” she said, “and having them in multiple languages would be wonderful.”

Online meeting notices are available in multiple languages, but don’t give people enough time to prepare and actually go to the meeting itself, Wong-Bigelow said.

Releasing meeting minutes sooner and adding closed captions to televised meetings would make it easier for community members to stay informed about schools, she added.

She listed strengthening ELL education and equity as her top priorities.

“I feel that in Waltham Public Schools we are not as broad thinking right now as some of our neighbors,” she said, “and I want to help bring about some improvements to help our school be more competitive with our neighboring cities.” 

Wong-Bigelow is one of four candidates running for three open seats.