Candidate Profile: Sara Brescia For Manassas City School Board

MANASSAS, VA – Six candidates are seeking three seats on the Manassas City School Board. Patch invited each of the candidates to share their backgrounds, priorities and views on issues facing Manassas residents through a candidate questionnaire.

Sara Brescia is an incumbent school board member seeking reelection and a paralegal with a background in education. Her answers to Patch's questions are below.

Name

Sara Brescia

Party affiliation

Independent

Party endorsements

Republican

Campaign website

Sara Brescia for School Board

Campaign social media

TikTok: sarabrescia_manassas, Instagram: sarabrescia4manassasschoolbd, Facebook: Re-Elect Sara Brescia for Manassas City School Board

Why are you running for this office?

Manassas families deserve schools that work. I am one of the only Board members with kids in our schools, and I believe this matters. It makes a difference when Board members have to live with the consequences of their decisions in their own homes, and it makes a difference in the urgency with which issues are acknowledged and tackled. The Board needs people willing to admit to our problems and to drive changes while representing the interests and needs of kids first.

On a high level, the Board needs to culturally shift away from its historically passive approach and be unafraid to set a high standard for our kids, for the adults that serve them, and for ourselves as an oversight body. Over the past four years, I have spearheaded and supported initiatives that do just that.

We all have pride in our schools, and I appreciate the hard work that so many of our teachers and other staff have put into them. However, two things can be true: we can have schools where so much good work has already occurred and still have more to do. My goal for continued service on the Board will be to deliver better schools through an approach that is unafraid to recognize and dive deeply into how we can improve. I am here to drive that positive change.

What do constituents tell you is most important to them for the coming term? (Limit to three topics, please.)

Constituents worry about how our public schools perform and want to see both better academic scores and student behavior. Both are possible with committed leadership and have shown signs of progress.

For example, persistent advocacy for student safety has resulted in concrete changes that have reduced major discipline incidents across the division and off-campus truancy at Osbourn specifically. Absenteeism has improved dramatically in most of our schools due to instituting a more aligned approach, beginning with the Board receiving more frequent and more detailed attendance updates and creating more opportunities to assess trends and provide feedback. More is required–chronic absence is still unacceptably high at Osbourn, and consistent behavioral supports still require implementation and monitoring at all levels.

Academically, some of our schools are making progress (though none yet have achieved division targets), while others lag and have not progressed. It is the Board’s oversight role to notice and monitor these inconsistencies and to prompt the administration to explore these trends and develop concrete recommendations for improvement.

Personally, I have focused on restoring student accountability for their own learning. Prior to my service on the Board, the division had a no-zero grading policy, in which kids were given a grade of 50 for work they did not even attempt. I successfully advocated to reintroduce the zero to MCPS grade books (new this year), and I expect that restoring student accountability and setting this high standard will play a positive role in our academics.

What are your day-one priorities, if elected?

To support improvement in our academics, going into my second term:

I want to continue existing conversations about artificial intelligence and also study and take more purposeful direction on screentime and division device usage generally. Improper use of these technologies is associated with poor learning outcomes and decreases in student well-being, though it is also important to teach students vital technological skills.

As a Board member, I have already made multiple proposals on artificial intelligence to ensure that the division’s approach is consistent and ethical. On screens, I have also shown leadership on ensuring enforcement of our bell-to-bell cell phone ban. I am monitoring developments in neighboring divisions–such as use of artificial intelligence detection software and student access to YouTube–and would continue to bring forward appropriate initiatives so that our students have the opportunity to grow, develop, and learn, while also developing the skills to be successful in today’s changing workplaces.

With the future so much in flux, Career & Technical Education offerings have never been more important. Our CTE department has successfully increased the opportunities available to students, and continued support and prioritization of this work is important.

What are your longer-term goals, if elected?

It is my goal for MCPS to become the kind of school system that families across the City feel meets their needs. For this to happen, the School Board must become a place where we are unafraid to identify issues and to do the deep, difficult, and often-uncomfortable work of solving them.

The point is best illustrated with an anecdote. When I first joined the Board, the division was gripped by a classroom teacher vacancy issue such that students as young as kindergarten were forced into in-school virtual learning due to a lack of qualified classroom teachers.

Although there were no Board members who were happy with this, it was (at that time) only me who confronted and discussed the issue consistently: on my social media, in my newsletter, and by getting the issue re-considered on the dais. Other Board members objected to this on the rationale that continued discussion of the issue made the division look bad.

Although I believe it was a well-intended sentiment, an approach that prioritizes the egos of adults, instead of the needs of kids, and an approach that shields issues from deep exploration, is not how problems get solved. And, indeed, once this issue was talked about more deeply and consistently (in part because I would not shut up about it), the Board was able to solve it by revamping our salary scales with funding help from the City Council. Classroom vacancies today are now minimal.

My longer-term goal is to transform our Board culture from one that passively accepts our problems and instead become one that pursues excellence energetically and without apology.

What about your professional or other background has prepared you for this office?

I currently sit on the School Board, and I already have a record of successful initiatives, such as pushing to study our achievement gap for our Students With Disabilities, tackling our classroom teacher vacancy crisis through persistent advocacy, leading on the repeal of the division’s previous “no zero” grading policy, and instituting an ad hoc Immigrant & Refugee advisory committee to ensure that students continued to attend and families stayed engaged with school following changes to national-level immigration enforcement.

As a mom of 3 young kids and current Board member for our regional Boys & Girls Club–and a previous preschool co-manager and public school educator–I understand well the challenges that kids face today and how school system can work to better serve them.

I grew up in a working-class town outside of Chicago with a large immigrant community of people from Poland, Greece, and the Arabian Peninsula. My father worked at a truck depot and my mother struggled at community college at night while raising three kids. Many of my childhood friends or their parents were English language learners, and many families in my area struggled financially. Yet, the public schools we attended performed at a high level and were key to our success. I know the same is possible in Manassas.

Aside from winning the election, what has been your most important campaign goal?

No matter what happens in November, I am still directly invested in this school system until at least through 2042, which is when my youngest will graduate (he is 2 years old, and I gave birth to him halfway through my first term without missing a single School Board meeting). I plan to stay involved in any productive capacity I can until then and beyond.

Through this campaign and through my existing years of service on the School Board, I have met families and individuals who are also invested in the success of MCPS and who now have a way to stay in touch due to the campaign and my current work on the Board. This network of people with similar visions and priorities for MCPS can become a supportive force for positive change in our schools, regardless of whether I personally sit on the dais or not.