Victor Lee is pitching himself to voters as a candidate who brings expertise and a data-based, results-oriented approach to school governance.

“I’m the only candidate in the race this year, and maybe for a long time, that has both the experience of working with superintendents and school boards across the country.”

Running for the Ward 8 seat on the Newton School Committee in the upcoming local election, Lee said he hopes to guide how policy decisions are being made at the highest levels of the district to ensure all students have the appropriate opportunities to success.

“One of my biggest priorities is to make sure that students have the opportunity for academic excellence and achievement,” he said.

A Newton native, Lee currently serves as a superintendent fellow at Arlington Public Schools and is completing his doctorate in educational leadership at Harvard University. He has advised and observed classrooms in public school districts across the state and taught marketing, communications and business courses at The Wharton School of Business.

He also points to his multi-decade career in the private sector as a source of valuable experience, which includes his recent position as VP of Business Management at the Boston-based adaptive learning and education technology company HMH.

“Because I spent half of my career in the private sector world, I have experience understanding how things operate within the educational sphere and how things operate within the private sector sphere, and where there are opportunities to learn from each other or where there are disconnects.”

Budgets and union disputes

Lee envisions a “two-pronged” approach to the current budgetary stresses that the district is experiencing. “One is, are there ways that we can tap and generate more funding for the school system? And the second is, if the former isn’t possible, what do we have to move around and adjust?”

On revenue, he highlights three specific measures that he thinks should be explored to shore up NPS budgets: Pursue higher state reimbursement, specifically for special education; continue public conversations to build community appetite for options such as a Proposition 2 ½ override; and discuss adjusting Newton’s accelerated pension timetables with the retirement board to ease short-term budgetary pressures.

He stressed a general air of collaboration among city and school staff as key to addressing the question of expanding revenue sources and ensuring long-term budgetary stability. “I want to be careful because you don’t want to interfere with the superintendent’s ability to manage her staff, but I do think there are opportunities to have more direct dialogue.”

To this end, he also sees program cuts deemed necessary as a matter of collaboration throughout the district.

“It is very important to have that conversation with Dr. Nolin and NTA before jumping in and saying these are areas we need to cut,” he said.

Still, he acknowledged the sobering reality of such actions. “Cuts will be painful regardless of how you do it. But solvency of the district is paramount.”

Although Lee has served in a union before (HGSU-UAW), he was against the 2024 teachers’ strike and says the strike, with its negative impacts on students and families, was an avoidable breakdown in proper communication and staff relations.

“These major incidents like the strike do not happen unless there are multiple points of breakdown. All of the parties involved had opportunities to do better,” he said, emphasizing that he opposes teachers’ strikes in general. “My personal philosophy is that educators are so essential, especially to student learning, that we really need to keep them in the classroom as much as possible. Our focus should be on avoiding the conditions that lead to strikes, not legalizing them, as my opponent wishes.”

Supporting vulnerable students

Supporting vulnerable students is very important for Lee, who has a neurodivergent child. To him, special education funding and the continued adoption of the multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) are central to future equity and long-term financial stability.

Speaking on the pilot of MTSS reporting across NPS, he remarked, “I am a big fan, and I think the pilot has gone well. In the short term it will probably cost more money to deploy more widely, and it takes a fundamental shift in approach, new training and getting the right resources to support that.”

He also reaffirmed the positives of such tools, which allow for a greater capability to support students’ progression.

“In the long term, I think it will actually benefit everyone, and not just students who need intervention early,” Lee said. “It will help students who can with special needs get back to the general ed classroom faster if they are identified earlier.” 

When it comes to the general mental wellbeing of all NPS students, Lee calls for an approach that prevents major crises while still holding students to proper academic standards.

“The last thing you want to do is to go back to over a decade ago or so when there were some really serious [mental health-related] incidents that took place in our schools.”

These concerns in mind, he reiterated calls for a more adequate workload to prepare students for their futures.

“If we’re phasing in, for example, the increase in homework load over times little bit of extra homework at a time, then we’re scaffolding [student developments],” he said. “Then, they’ve built up some grit, persistence, and they’ve built up that resiliency that will set them up better for college and careers.”

Victor Lee, candidate for School Committee, and Newton South High School student Anna Ciric discuss academic level placement at a forum hosted by Progressive Newton on May 20, 2025. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

A data-driven approach

Working with data throughout his entire career, Lee now calls for a “data-driven” approach to district administration–not simply a “data-informed” one.

He emphasized the need to put data to proper use. “It’s good being data-informed, I agree. But if you’re not taking action on it, then why are you even collecting that data.”

Lee calls for learning from the private sector how to approach data gathering and utilization and noted the use of Tableau Dashboards throughout private industry, which allow for organizations to neatly aggregate data sources into easy-to-read and understandable visualizations.

Still, he tempered this data-centric approach with the need for “qualitative” information and perspectives.

“The data sets help to provide you with a degree of scale and trend analysis, but understanding the people behind them requires a degree of qualitative assessment as well,” he said.

To Lee, this approach would not only bolster the district’s decision-making capabilities but also create an environment of far greater transparency–specifically for the parents of Newton students.

When it comes to the question of standardized testing, such as the MCAS–a topic of heated contention throughout the state and country for years–Lee vouches for the ability of such tools to expel implicit biases among educators that may harm student progression.

“What you do want is to be able to compare students on an apples-to-apples basis and have some minimum level of consistency so that the teacher can then bring their own expertise.”

He noted related drawbacks in school classroom structures such as mixed-level classrooms.

“There’s a lot of research that shows that even great teachers can be naturally biased if they know that students were previously on lower tracks.”

Addressing bigotry

“A swastika, antisemitism has no place in our schools. Anti-Islamic or Anti-Muslim materials have no place in our schools. Anti-LGBTQIA, anti-transgender things–no place in our schools.” Lee sees addressing bigotry in NPS as key to ensuring a safe and prosperous environment for all students.

He speaks on the problem as someone who has experienced it firsthand. “I say [all this] as someone who got my car keyed during COVID with anti-Asian slurs.”

He is also an ardent supporter of utilizing restorative practices to attempt to repair relations and foster understanding, and he believes that instances of bigotry should be examined on a case-by-case basis.

“We have to be rational and say, if it’s a third or fourth grader or young middle schooler who may be copying something or trying to get a rise out of someone without understanding how serious that is, that’s an excellent opportunity to apply restorative justice practices.”

Still, he believes that if behavior is found to be especially egregious after an “appropriate investigation” is conducted, stringent disciplinary measures are appropriate to discourage similar behavior.

“Incidents happen, you just have to learn to deal with them and try to prevent them from happening again.”

Newton’s election will be Nov. 4.