Meet Rochester School Committee candidate Kirstin Jimenez

ROCHESTER — For six years, Kirstin Jimenez has served on the Parent-Teacher Organization at Rochester Memorial School, but with her daughter set to enter Old Rochester Regional Junior High School, she is now looking for a new way to be involved.

With one seat open on the Rochester School Committee, Jimenez decided to run for the position this election season.

“I just wanted to find a way to continue to support the teachers and staff at RMS because they deserve it, and I thought this was the best way to do it,” Jimenez said, who is currently the PTO parent president.

As parent president and with an office in the elementary school, Jimenez said she sees first hand the struggles students and teachers face, what the school is lacking, as well as what’s great about the school.

“I hear in the hallways in passing, ‘I’m so stressed out. Our little friend has been difficult today. I don’t have any [paraprofessionals] or this grade, they’ve been wretched today’ and there’s no help because they’re all down on the other end of the school,” she said.

“They just need more support, and I get to see that,” she added.

Jimenez said the PTO provides as much support as it can but added that the school committee needs to realize there’s not enough support for teachers, especially as the town population grows.

If elected to the Rochester School Committee, Jimenez said she would like to convince the other school committee members to spend some time volunteering in the school, stating that while many of them are former teachers, they “haven’t been in the school outside of their school committee duties in years.”

She would also want to create programs for parents to get more involved with their kids, improve literacy, create more integration with the school community as a whole and also address the school’s budget needs.

“I want to make sure that the kids get what they need by making sure the teachers get what they need,” Jimenez said.

She explained that being in the school building as frequently as she is has given her more of an inside look at how the budget could be spent.

“I want to make sure that somebody who has zero knowledge, doesn’t really have kids in the system, isn’t going to say, ‘We’re going to take another teacher away. We’re going to cut the budget again because you don’t need that many teachers,’” Jimenez said.

She added, “I would hate to see all that go away and the teachers lose what support they have while we’re working on these budget shortfalls.”

Jimenez said that she also wants to make sure teachers are taken care of.

“Everybody’s so great, but they’re all so stressed because they’ve got more work than they can handle, and it’s not their fault — there’s eight million things that goes into it,” she said, adding, “I’d just love to find a way to finagle things so it all works out in the end.”