Editor's note: HamletHub believes in democracy and we recently invited all Town of Ridgefield candidates to answer five questions, giving residents an opportunity to learn more about their candidacy, Town involvement, and reasons for seeking office. If you will be on the ballot on November 5, we'd love to hear from you! Please see the information on the bottom of this post regarding this Q&A opportunity.
Sean McEvoy, Candidate for Ridgefield Board of Education
What office are you running for and why
I’m running for a spot on the Board of Education. After watching from the political sidelines as my two daughters navigated the school District (one just graduated college, one is a Junior at RHS) in the past couple of years I recently became much more involved with the school district. Having never run for political office, and seeing the recent District turmoil (superintendent churn, tax dollars redirected away from the classroom during a “budget freeze”, deferred maintenance taking a toll on school facilities) I decided to work with a team of wonderful, involved parents that have real-world experience in solving some of the budget and personnel issues the District faces.
What do you hope to accomplish should you be elected on November 5th?
Priority #1 is to find and hire a solid Superintendent. One that has real ideas on how to move the District forward, and more importantly, one that is willing to stick with the District for a longer-term view, to take some risks, to think a bit differently.
Priority #2 is a bit more three dimensional. We have a nexus of challenges the District is facing with declining enrollment, transportation issues, elementary start/end time inequity, deferred maintenance in our school buildings, unfunded state mandates, the introduction of new curricula. We need to see where these issues intersect, and solve them together, not as individual, siloed issues.
Tell me about your current involvement in Ridgefield
For the past seven years, I’ve been involved with the Ridgefield Office of Emergency Management (OEM) and more specifically, the CERT (Community Emergency Response Team). The past two years, I have been the Director of the CERT volunteer team. You may or may not know about our group of roughly one hundred forty volunteers, but you likely see our work when areas of town are impacted by storm damage and power outages. Our team works with the town Fire and Police departments, the highway department, the schools and the utilities to triage and assess damage throughout town, and prioritize the recovery. We train for incidents of all types, but Ridgefield seems to get a lot of storm relates incidents, and we’re getting very good at responding to these. During the four storms in 2018, I led a small team to improve the social media footprint of CERT, to take in data from town residents online (instead of just by phone), and provide quicker access for the town agencies, and more importantly, the residents on recovery efforts. This streamlined communication allowed quicker assessment of problem areas while keeping the town informed on progress. I hope to bring some of these types of communication methodologies to the Board of Education.
I also recently joined the Region 5 Cybersecurity Task Force as Secretary. It is our responsibility to guide the twenty-three towns in Connecticut’s Region 5 (towns North of Ridgefield) in their cybersecurity knowledge, ongoing training, and policies to keep these towns safe online. As a career technology/security professional, I have some unique insight into security postures of companies of all sizes, as well as state and local governments.
Biggest crisis facing our town?
The town is facing many challenges, but I’m running for the Board of Education, where we have a number of challenges to solve. We’re currently faced with significantly declining enrollment, as families move out of town. We need to take a look at our nearly $100m school budget (roughly 2/3 of the town’s spending), to ensure that we’re spending the right amount to keep out District at its current high level of performance, while also making sure we’re spending tax dollars efficiently. We need to keep our school district the primary reason that people want to move to town.
Name a person (dead or alive) who you look up to
There are so many, but I’m going to say, my wife’s uncle. “Uncle Joe”. My parents divorced when I was young, and my father wasn’t around. I started dating my wife, Lisa in college. Uncle Joe became a bit of a father figure of me early on in our relationship. We had very different upbringings, in very different decades, but over the past 30+ years, I’ve learned more from him about what’s actually important in life. Family.
Rules for candidates who wish to participate in our Q&A:
*Please answer 5 of the 6 questions.
*You MUST answer #1
*Please include a photo with your answers
*Please email to Ridgefield@HamletHub.com
We will publish your answers in Ridgefield HamletHub, on our social media pages, in our evening e-newsletter and Google News.
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What office are you running for and why
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What do you hope to accomplish should you be elected on November 5th?
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Tell me about your current involvement in Ridgefield (include nonprofits)
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Biggest crisis facing our Town?
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Name a few of your favorite books
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Name a person (dead or alive) who you look up to
Learn more here.