Candidate for
Board Member; Cincinnati City School District

As an elected member of the State Board of Education, Melanie represents District 4, encompassing Hamilton and Warren Counties. She has been serving our area for the past seven years and has been elected to two successive terms. Melanie's 2001 committee assignments are Resources Committee, Post Secondary Enrollment Subcommittee (chair), representative to the State Board on the Advisory Committee for Gifted Education and the Advisory Committee for Special Education. She is also on the steering committee for the 2001 National Conference for Coordinators of Gifted education. In past years Melanie has served as the Chair of the Budget and Legislative Committee of the State Board.

Urban education has been Melanie's advocacy and passion during her tenure on the State Board of Education. She provided her leadership to organize the twenty-one urban districts statewide and to spearhead the Urban Initiative of the Ohio Department of Education. A member of Ohio's Title I team, Melanie travels to other urban centers - Memphis, Houston, Atlanta, El Paso, Cleveland, Columbus - to learn about national trends in urban school reform and to share the work of Ohio and Cincinnati. Melanie also worked with the United Sates Department of Education to implement the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration Project legislation by serving on a Sate Grant Panel.

Melanie has been an active member of the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) and is currently the Special Education liaison with NASBE for Ohio. She served on a national study group that published a report on "School Funding and What Works," which examined the correlation between funding and school reform efforts.

Melanie has been an active participant in the reforms of her home district, the Cincinnati Public Schools. In 1992, she was appointed to serve as a parent representative on the Promotion Standards Subcommittee, the educators who laid the early foundation for the standards-based reform of the district. She also was appointed by the superintendent to serve on the District Redesign Team that planned the practical implementation of the recommendations of the Buenger Commission Report.

As a result of her experience, Melanie believes strongly that the bottom line in school reform is in the delivery of services at the classroom level. It is imperative that educators have the capacity to serve the students that are in their classrooms today. High quality preservice and ongoing professional development are essential in the reform of PreK-12 education.