Editor’s Note: Ben Schlesinger’s father, Alan Schlesinger, serves on the Newton Beacon’s Board of Directors.

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As a parent, Ben Schlesinger has been actively involved with his kids’ schools. He speaks with school leadership regularly. He fought against staff cuts at his kids’ schools a couple of years ago. He served on the advisory committees to find the current superintendent and Zervas principal.

He’s coached Little League for much of his adult life.

And he wants to turn his involvement up a few notches and help the schools navigate these unprecedented times in a more official capacity.

Schlesinger is running for the Ward 5 School Committee seat currently held by Vice Chair Emily Prenner, who is not running for reelection. Schlesinger will face candidate Jenna Miara in November’s election.

From the pitcher’s mound to the boardroom

Schlesinger attended Cabot Elementary School as well as the Day and Bigelow middle schools before going on to Newton North High School. His father, Alan Schlesinger is an attorney, and his mother, Susan, worked as a medical social worker before she retired.

Schlesinger and his dad coached youth baseball for many years.

“We started coaching the Phillies when my brother was a player on the team—I was in high school, and he was 10—and we just kept doing it after that,” Schlesinger said, sitting at a crowded Café Nero in Newtonville on a hot July afternoon.

He earned his bachelor’s degree in politics and economics from Brandeis and his MBA from MIT.

Schlesinger and his wife, Iris, have two kids—son, Noah, age 11, and daughter, Julia, age 8—attending Zervas Elementary School in Waban.

Schlesinger runs his own tech operations consulting startup company, helping tech businesses solve problems and grow. He’s been an executive and founder of five startup companies since graduating from MIT.

“I’ve worked on growth and strategy operations, really everything about how to run and run a business and grow a business,” he said.

Schlesinger said his ability to help different kinds of organizations and people through troubleshooting would come in handy on the School Committee.

“I’ve spent a lot of time building communication skills, and that starts with listening,” he said. “I know how to listen, hear what people are telling me, ask the right questions, and doing that, I can connect with people. I find ways to bridge gaps.

Staying engaged

Schlesinger is impressed with Superintendent Anna Nolin—who started in 2023 and has already served through multiple budgets crises and a teachers’ strike—and noted that with the near-total turnover of the School Committee (Tamika Olszewski and Alicia Piedalue are the only members running for reelection, and Piedalue has only served since April) gives an opportunity for a new committee to help see Nolin’s vision for the schools come as close to reality as possible.

“It is a pivotal moment, and I’m convinced that we have a transformative leader, and I’m really excited to work with Anna Nolin, to support her vision, to help her build on the foundation that we have, and innovate on it, to build a truly world-class public school system, and to center that school system around the students who have sometimes not been at the center of all the decision-making,” he said. “So I think Anna’s on the right track. I think she’s got the right vision. She needs the right team around her and the right committee supporting her to execute and deliver for the people.”

One area Schlesinger said Nolin has mastered is communication, and he wants the School Committee to follow her lead.

“Everybody I’ve spoken to has spoken with Anna Nolin and remember some conversation they have with her—young people, not-young people—It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Everyone in our community seems like they spoke, and that’s to her credit. The school committee needs to be engaged with the citizens.”

Schlesinger wants to take a cue from Nolin on talking with the people in the schools, too.

“We should be talking to students, and we need to do a much better job than has historically been done communicating with teachers,” he said. “One of the things that has stood out for me in this process that I’ve learned about it is how poor those lines of communication were for years leading up to the strike, how unheard the teachers felt, how disrespected they felt.”

Crunching the numbers

To say NPS is entering a time of uncertainty is an understatement. The Trump administration is planning to eliminate the Department of Education and is threatening to cut off funds to Newton due to the city’s sanctuary city status and DEI policies.

The state is facing a shortfall from federal cuts that is sure to trickle down to the cities and towns in the form of state aid cuts.

Mayor Ruthanne Fuller has said the schools will need a Proposition 2 ½ tax levy override in the next few years to keep NPS afloat. She’s not running for reelection, but if Marc Laredo is going to become mayor in January, Schlesinger said the School Committee needs to start working with him ASAP on funding the schools.

“The money they’ve been given hasn’t been enough, so we need to convince the mayor about what we can do with more money,” Schlesinger said.

Schlesinger pointed to School Committee Chair Chris Brezski, who did a sort of outreach tour with Nolin during this year’s budget crisis and who worked with Nolin to negotiate with the mayor for more school funding for the FY2026 budget.

Schlesinger said he wants to follow Brezski’s example “to bring ideas to the table, to say to Marc, not just, ‘give me more, give me more,’ but say, ‘here’s how much more I need, here’s why I need it, and here are my ideas.’”

And some bold ideas may be needed to offset state and federal cuts and local budget shortfalls.

One idea Schlesinger supports is an adjustment in the city’s pension fund liability payoff. Municipalities were given until 2040 to pay theirs off but Newton, ahead of the game for a while, moved its payoff date to 2031 by scheduling higher annual payments now. This is set to free up tens of millions of dollars for the city from 2032 onward, which can be used for the schools, but many are calling on the city to push its pension payoff back a few years so the city and the schools can have more money now.

The pension payoff plan is managed by a special board, and the mayor would have to go to them to request an adjustment.

City Councilor Rick L:ipof, left, and School Committee candidate Ben Schlesinger, right, hang out at Newton Highlands Village Day on June 8, 2025. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

The ‘O’ word

And what about a Proposition 2 ½ override? In 2023, Fuller asked voters to approve three overrides. They approved one and rejected two.

Schlesinger supported all of the overrides in 2023 and said he’d be open to another one, but he wants it to be part of a comprehensive strategy that also includes pension payoff and other ideas.

“The simple fact is, if the budget grows at three and a half percent a year, and health care costs grow over 10% a year, the math isn’t mathing, so I think we need to sort of an all-of-the above approach to finding more money for the schools,” he said. “And of course, it’s also our job to make sure that we spend it in a responsible and disciplined way. And I have a lot of confidence in superintendent Nolan that she is spending her money in a responsible and disciplined way.”

If an override request comes, Schlesinger said he’d like to see it be big and inclusive of the city departments and not just the schools.

Timing is tricky, too. An override request is unheard of in a mayor’s first year, Schlesinger said, so he doubts one will come for FY2027. And launching an override campaign for FY2028 wouldn’t save Newton’s coffers in time for the state and federal cuts that are coming for FY2027.

For Schlesinger, the time for Newton to act is sooner, not later.

“And that’s where I think we have to rethink the pension funding,” he explained. “I think that in high-water times we need to be more forward-looking—I fought very hard in 2023, and I led the Zervas parent community in fighting against some teacher cuts—but I think we’re headed not for high-water times, but for low-water times. And I think that we probably don’t have the luxury of trying to pay down the obligation by 2031 I think we’re going to have to find a way to push that out.”

With housing supply low and demand high, young families aren’t moving to Newton and older residents are having to foot more and more of the city’s tax burden. If and when an override request does come, proponents will have the task of convincing voters to support it, while most voters in Newton don’t have kids in the schools.

How do you convince people who don’t have kids in the schools to raise their own taxes in the wake of a global inflation crisis and economic instability?

“I think there are two parts. The part that I can control and have my fingerprints on is better schools,” Schlesinger said. “It’s saying, ‘This is what we can build with this money and can’t build without it.’ There are meaningful, exciting, tangible things—things like foreign language teaching in the elementary school like they do in Needham, introducing technology and computer programming earlier to the students—we need more money to do that.”

Better schools bring property values up for all Newton property taxpayers, too, Schlesinger added.

But a second strategy he wants to see involves making an override request bigger, not smaller, and encompassing departments and services citywide, not just the schools.

“School families are 20, 25% of the city,” he noted. “There are other folks that care about potholes, so let’s increase the amount of paving that we do in a given year with the override money. What do the police need? What do the firefighters need? What do the parks need? What does the Senior Center need? How can we put things in there that will help not just the schools, but everybody else?”

School Choice and multilevel classrooms

Each year the School Committee must vote on  whether or not to join School Choice, a state program that allows families to enroll their kids in school districts outside their community.

Newton has never opted into School Choice. And Schlesinger said he’s against the idea, at least for now.

“I don’t support it right now, but I’m open minded,” he said. “I listened to Anna make the case last time, and she didn’t convince me. But I’m always willing to keep listening and to be convinced if she presents new information, it seemed to me that the revenue impact didn’t justify the initiative that she was putting in front of us, and I don’t love impacting classrooms, impacting the experience the kids are having in pursuit of dollars. I want us to do things for the betterment of our students.”

Another debate last school year centered around multi-level classroom learning, in which students at the college prep-level are put into classrooms with honors-level students to provide expanded learning opportunity to both groups.

The initiative has been met with frustration from teachers, students and families who say it negatively impacts both the honors student and the college prep-level student and makes a teacher’s job nearly impossible. But proponents say the program needs more time to show benefits.

Schlesinger is not a fan.

“Ryan Normandy [Newton teacher[ wrote a very compelling piece in The Boston Globe about it, and he stood up and spoke at the School Committee,” he said “The students that I’ve spoken to broadly so far don’t think that they’re getting value. The parents that I spoken to don’t like it. Who is this system benefiting?”

Newton’s election will be on Nov. 4.