Victor Lee of Newton Centre and his wife, Cui Wang were going to enroll their oldest daughter—who has neurodivergent special needs—in Memorial Spaulding Elementary School but instead chose a school in Brookline that could better handle her specific needs.

“My aspiration is to bring her back for high school,” Lee said.

For that to happen, however, he said things would have to change in Newton’s schools.

That’s one of the reasons Lee is running for the Ward 8 School Committee seat.

Lee was raised in Newton and moved away until about a ten years ago when his first daughter was born and he and his wife decided Newton was where they wanted to raise their family. They now have two daughters, and Lee is a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a superintendent fellow with the Arlington Public Schools administration.

“I think Arlington does a really good job, quite honestly—their superintendent, their School Committee and the unions,” Lee said. “And watching what’s happened here over the last few years—the strike, the COVID operations—there’s just an opportunity to do things a little better.”

Incidentally, Ward 3 School Committee member Anping Shen, who’s prohibited from running again because of term limits, is currently the only one on the committee with a PhD in an education-related field.

Lee would bring more than a degree to the committee, though. He’s worked for the past 10 years at HMH, a K-12 educational technology company that helps shape and modernize curriculum.

“So I kind of know what makes for a really effective curriculum, what makes for a good assessment, what makes for good professional development,” Lee said. “Those are things that I’ve worked on, and I think Newton needs a refresh of the curriculum. There hasn’t been a real extensive review in decades, I think.”

Lee, who has an MBA from Wharton School of Economics, wants to focus on budget efficiencies because costs are rising and the NPS budget is in perpetual crisis.

“And I know the School Committee has some limitations in terms of what they can actually do,” he said. “I do like Mayor Fuller, I just think she’s wrong on this issue. We need to do ‘level services-plus,’ at a bare minimum.”

Does that mean Lee supports the idea of a Proposition 2 ½ tax levy override in the future to shore up the NPS budget for the coming years? Maybe. He’d like to try some cost-cutting and revenue-building ideas first before going to an override.

“I don’t think it’s necessary yet, but we need to prepare for that possibility and building a case for why people should agree to it,” he said. “I would never rule it out, but it wouldn’t be my first choice.”

Speaking of controversial topics: What does Lee think of the debate around multi-level classroom learning?

“I think there are some cases in which multi-level isn’t always good,” he said. “We need to give it some more time to play out but also be honest about what the data is telling us.”

Lee said people are missing the nuance in the multi-level classroom discussion, because subjects like English Language Arts have had more success with it than STEM courses. And making sure the teachers and staff are trained in multi-level instruction properly matters, too.

“Years ago, Montgomery County down in Maryland did this with success, and they were able to get kids who were underrepresented higher up and better performing,” Lee said. “But a big part of it was they were taught how to do differentiated instruction and they had the curriculum and the technologies to make it possible.”

The Ward 8 race could be a crowded one. That seat is held by Barry Greenstein, and last week, retired teacher Jim Murphy announced he was running for the seat as well.