Hi, I’m Henry Gwazda, and I’ve been proud to call Marblehead home for the past 15 years. My wife and I moved here, bought a house, and have since welcomed two amazing daughters into our lives. My oldest is at Brown School, and my youngest will be joining her next year — so I’m deeply invested in the future of our schools.

Professionally, I have a background in marketing and graphic design, which means I’m always thinking creatively and strategically, and I need to make decisions based on a wide range of stakeholder feedback — skills I believe would serve me well on the School Committee. But more than that, I love this community — the people, the sense of connection, and the history. That’s what makes Marblehead so special, and it’s why I’m passionate about giving back.

I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way.

If you see me around town, please don't hesitate to chat with me, or find my contact information at the bottom of this page.

What I Believe

Value for Taxpayers

Investing tax dollars in our schools and our students' futures is essential in any town in America. I support fully funding our schools, paying our teachers and school staff a fair and competitive wage, and keeping our schools and facilities in first-class condition. In Marblehead, we have specific tax challenges that we face when deciding how to fund our schools, and sometimes we need to pass overrides to keep our schools competitive and fund our children's future.

It's important to me that the people of this town feel their money is being managed responsibly, and they are informed about where that money is being spent and why. There are many instances of the current School Committee not meeting this standard of responsibility, including the High School roof project proposal, legal and public relations fees, and firing our former Superintendent, John Buckey, without a suitable explanation.

If elected, I will ensure the community knows how their money is being spent. When we need to ask for more money, you'll know why we are asking, and that you can trust us to spend it effectively.

Student Success

Anyone elected to serve on the School Committee has made a commitment to our students to provide them with the best education and experience we can provide them, and has a responsibility to uphold this commitment in everything they do.

The stated mission of the Marblehead School Committee is to foster in our students a passion for learning, and to provide a safe and nurturing environment in which they can develop the values, knowledge, and skills needed to achieve full potential in their personal, social and work lives, and become contributing members of society.

I believe in this mission, but there is still a lot of work to do in order to succeed.

We need to listen to our educators and provide them everything we can to help them succeed. We need to be sure the schools are properly staffed and they have all the resources they need to provide a safe and functional environment for our students. These are our front-line workers and they need our support.

I want to find ways to be competitive with the best schools in the Commonwealth and provide our students with a first-rate education that will bring them success for the rest of their lives, while also providing a supportive and enriching environment that they will look back on fondly.8

Community Engagement

One of the School Committee's primary responsibilities is to provide the community with a voice in our schools. This is exactly why is it an elected position. But that responsibility doesn't end after election day.

The current School Committee has not been effectively listening to the community, the teachers, or the students. They've also failed at communicating back to the community.

The way they handled issues such as the High School roof project, the flag policy, the teachers strike, and staffing issues in the administration, including Superintendent John Buckey, show a complete lack of transparency and communication that needs to be addressed.

In February 2024, 140 Marblehead residents gave the School Committee a failing grade, and almost 800 people signed a petition agreeing with them. In November 2024, 1,370 people signed a petition saying they had lost confidence in the School Committee. We need to make a change.

As representatives of the community, we need to listen when people speak. As decision-makers for our students' educations, we need to be clear about our decisions, and communicate why we made them. I consider these responsibilities to be absolutely central to running our schools.

Current Issues

Upheaval in the School Administration

Marblehead High School Roof

Our High School needs a new roof. The issues with the roof are creating an unsafe and unhealthy environment for our students. It also reflects poorly on our investment in our students to have leaks, mold, and ceiling tiles falling. It is essential that we approve the funds for this project.

However, the School Committee already asked for $5.3 million for the roof, which was approved at Town Meeting in 2022. This project never happened. There are a lot of excuses and claims as to what happened with this project, but clearly there were issues with the request made in 2022, and now we need to approve an $8.6 million debt exclusion, which includes the roof and new HVAC units.

While I unequivocally support securing the funds for this project, the sentiment that I hear in town is hesitation that the same people who mismanaged the original project are responsible for managing the new one. There was concern at Town Meeting that this project still wasn't fully explored. People are willing to give the schools money, they just want to be sure that we can be trusted with it, and we know what we're doing. I'm hoping a change in the School Committee will assure people that it will be done right this time.

Now that the debt exclusion has passed Town Meeting, I urge you to vote in favor of fixing the MHS roof.

Flag Policy

The current School Committee's insistence on spending 18 months developing a flag policy is, frankly, baffling to many in this community. While making policies for our district is a primary responsibility of the School Committee, this is an issue that is best left in the hands of the administration, as it has been throughout the history of Marblehead schools.

I am so proud of this community for getting involved and making their voices heard. Your engagement is inspiring. Being a student at our schools is much more than academics. It's a time when you make lifelong friends and connections, discover who you are, and find a community that supports you. In the public forums it was clear that flags and representation are important. I'm particularly proud of the students who stepped up and created a very thorough and reasonable proposal, which was reviewed by legal experts. These students embodied the values of being engaged and active members of society.

This policy is both poorly written and completely unnecessary. I urge anyone in this town to walk around the school and look at all the different flags and banners hanging on the walls. Ask yourself if the flag policy, as it was approved, applies to these flags. We hang a banner for Swampscott in the Field House, and they are our bitter rivals. At best, this policy is not clear. At worst, this policy seems to be intended to ban two specific flags: the Black Lives Matter and Pride flags. If so, this is censorship by the School Committee, and makes us vulnerable to lawsuits.

The School Committee asked for our feedback and heard overwhelming support from the public for allowing students to fly the flags of their choice. However, in the end, the only opinions they acted on were their own. This is not the representation that we deserve.

We need to go back to the way flags were handled in our schools for hundreds of years: leave it up to the principles and administration to manage, let them do their jobs, and get the School Committee focused on its primary responsibilities.

Teacher Contract Negotiations

Allowing the contract negotiations with school employees and educators reach the point where our teachers went on strike was unacceptable. This didn't happen all in one day. There were many opportunities over an extended period of time to resolve these issues and reach a fair contract. School Committees all over the Commonwealth are able to do this successfully, but our School Committee failed us, our educators, and our students. The way this was handled was frustrating and demoralizing for everyone involved, and does not reflect the community values that make Marblehead great. Most importantly, it negatively affected the students and set a bad example from the people who are meant to be our leaders.

We saw a massive outpouring of support for our teachers during the strike. I was there holding signs, delivering food, and supporting the negotiations at the High School, along with scores of other members of the community, as well as the students most affected by the strike. Everyone was working toward getting the students back in school and providing our educators with fair and competitive compensation that meets the standard of the education we want our students to receive. The School Committee was unwilling to negotiate in good faith, and instead seemed to be more concerned with talking to their lawyers and PR firms and exploring ways to punish union leaders, rather than coming back with reasonable counter-proposals. The committee spent $152,286 in legal fees on the Unit A negotiations alone. In the end, after threatening a painful override to pay for the new contracts, we had the money the whole time, and no override would be required for the new contracts. This process was mishandled from start to finish, and we need to make changes to the School Committee to be sure it doesn't happen again.

We've never received a satisfying explanation for why John Buckey was removed as Superintendent, less than two months after a unanimously approved evaluation by the School Committee where he was rated at "proficient" in all the evaluated standards, and having met or made significant progress toward the district's goals. There have been attempts to provide some reasoning behind their abrupt decision, but they haven't justified such drastic action. The whole thing is suspicious, and evidently based on issues outside of the committee's evaluation criteria. This decision not only created confusion and upheaval in our school administration, but it cost the town a lot of money in compensation and legal/PR fees, and damaged our credibility. The reasons for that decision should have been clear. Two years later, and we still don't have a permanent Superintendent in place.

Five-Year Plan

The five year plan developed for our district ends in June of 2026. We need to start building a new set of goals now. We need to create a set of goals that are specific and measurable, so they can be used as a guidance tool over the next five years. For example: one goal reads “By June 30, 2026, the Marblehead Public Schools will have equitable staff compensation.” This isn’t an easily measurable goal, and I’m sure the SC and the MEA disagree as to whether that goal has been met. I see my role as gathering the relevant feedback and data from teachers, students, administrators, and parents, building real goals that address their issues and concerns, and keeping the SC and administration on-task and empowering progress towards those goals.

20% Turnover Rate

Marblehead Public Schools experienced an unprecedented and concerning turnover rate in their teaching staff of more than 20% from the last school year to this one. The turnover rate is the biggest red flag in our district, although it doesn’t appear to be on the list of flags that the current SC cares about. Turnover rate of more than 20% should have set off alarms, the way it would with any business. This is a challenging question for this term on the SC, since the contract was already negotiated. I think the three biggest reasons teachers are leaving Marblehead are pay, disrespect from the SC, and stress.

So right now we need to focus on solutions to the issues with respect and stress. I won’t dwell on respect here, since I spoke to that in an earlier response, but there are things we need to do to address stress. Fixing staffing issues, particularly with special educators and paraprofessionals, would mean better safety and working conditions for all teachers. This is the most common complaint that I’ve heard in my discussions with teachers. One special educator I know has a 40-student case load between Glover and Brown. This is a major resourcing issue. Paying better attention to providing better services to special needs students would reduce the workload and stress on our teachers across the board, and would help with job satisfaction. Facility maintenance would also create better working conditions and a safer environment.

We also need to gather and listen to feedback from our teachers more effectively. Again, our educators are our boots on the ground everyday in the schools, and you will be most attuned to issues that need to be addressed. Having those earnest conversations is essential. We need to build solutions into our goals and stay focused on our plan.

Legal Representation

We have had some issues with legal representation over the past few years. Our law firm dropped us as a client in 2023, and then the committee hired a new law firm without doing their due diligence to seek out and review a slate of potential candidates. While the School Committee is exempt from typical procurement procedures when hiring a law firm, it would have been more responsible to conduct a proper search.

We've spent a tremendous amount of money on legal fees in the past two years with the issues with our Superintendent, the contract negotiations, and the flag policy. Numerous independent lawyers who reviewed the flag policy that the School Committee's legal counsel submitted have pointed out glaring legal issues.

It's time to do a proper review of our legal counsel to be sure we're being properly represented, and we're not wasting precious funds that could be going towards our facilities, our educators, and our students.

Conflicts of Interest

I am aware that there is some concern about my wife's position in the Marblehead schools being an undisclosed conflict of interest. I understand being concerned about this, and I'm happy to talk about it. I'll address the "undisclosed" part first. I am very proud of Marisa and the work she does in the schools. I think it's important for our elected officials to be open and honest, and I voluntarily disclosed my wife's connection to the schools publicly in a local paper when I pulled my nomination papers.

So I'll be clear here about Marisa's work in the schools. She works as an on-call building sub at Brown School. This means she works anywhere and everywhere that they need her, and they really do need her help as much as she can give it. She does not have a contract with the schools, and is not a member of the MEA teachers' union, nor is she eligible to be a member. She is also the garden teacher at Brown and Village schools, and she is not employed through the schools for that work. That work is provided by the Brown School PTO and SPUR.

Before I officially became a candidate I spoke with the lawyers at the State Ethics Commission about conflicts of interests, eligibility, and what I could and couldn't do as a member of the School Committee. There are some short forms I would need to file, and I would need to recuse myself from discussions and approvals of line-items directly related to my wife's work. I would still be allowed to vote on the entire budget or proposal.

I do not see this as a conflict of interest. I see it as an appropriate level of interest, the same way having a child in the schools or owning taxable property in town would be. I would never let my wife's position in the schools, or my child's personal experience, or the bottom line of my own personal financials affect the decisions I make on the School Committee. If you feel differently, or have any concerns you'd like to discuss, I urge you to reach out to me directly.

Contribute

It's important to create as much name recognition as I can and spread my message before the election on June 10th. I'm accepting donations to post as many yard signs as I possibly can. Venmo contributions are capped at $50 per individual. If you'd like to write a check, email me and I will send you my mailing address.

Contact Me

Reach out to discuss your vision for Marblehead schools and how we can work together for a better future for our students.

If you want a yard sign to show your support for changes to the School Committee, please let me know your address and I'll drop one off. Thanks!

Call or Text

412-225-3504

Email

henrygwazda@gmail.com