Issues and Priorities

Improving education across the Commonwealth

Our education system is the foundation of our society. It is the root from which everything grows. Preserving the best of what makes Massachusetts a great place to live and raise a family requires the following.

• Raise starting teacher salaries
• Increase state aid to public schools.
• Increase resources to treat and combat mental illness, including additional adjustment counselors.
• Pass state law that allows School District to ban cell phones in classrooms.

Society expects schools to play an increasing number of roles in a child’s life: to teach, to parent, to counsel, to ensure that students are growing academically, socially, emotionally, and kept safe. If schools are expected to effectively lead these efforts, they need the resources to do so.

Protecting Our planet and our environment

There is no greater issue that plagues America and the world more than climate change, the effects of which can be catastrophic to local communities. We need to do our part here in Massachusetts.

• Increase access to walking and bicycle lanes throughout Dover, Medfield, and Needham
• Decrease the use of fossil fuels by encouraging all state and local governments to speed the transition to electric vehicles
• Accelerate the installation of electric charging ports
• Decrease the use of plastic bottles, plastic bags and non-biodegradable products
• Increase incentives for use of Mass Transit

Increasing the supply of affordable housing

Massachusetts has a shortage of affordable housing. Indeed, in many localities police, teachers, firefighters and nurses can no longer afford to live in the communities they serve.

There are policies we can enact to alleviate the housing shortage:

• Tax credits for police, firefighters, teachers, nurses, and other public servants to purchase a home so they can live in or near the communities they serve
• Tax breaks/interest subsidies for young families buying their first home
• Provide developers with incentives to construct new green-energy, middle-class housing

Fixing what’s wrong with health care

According to the Cicero Institute, by 2030 Massachusetts is projected to be short 725 primary care providers; 55% of Massachusetts physicians report experiencing burnout. 27% of Massachusetts physicians report intention to leave medicine by 2026. Members of our community want to be able to see their doctor promptly when they are ill and not pay an exorbitant price for the medical care they need.

We either get ahead of this problem or it will become a crisis:

• Improve access and affordability
• Increase support for local community hospitals and ambulatory care centers
• Recruit additional doctors and medical specialists to MA
• Improve access to timely and affordable health care across the Commonwealth

Protecting Reproductive Rights

Decisions affecting a woman’s health care should be made by she and her doctor, absent interference by politicians or law enforcement authorities. Period.

Ending Gun Violence

When Josh was growing up, a middle school friend accessed his father’s open weapon safe and accidentally, fatally, shot himself. The heartache felt in Josh’s hometown in the aftermath of this tragedy persists today.

As the principal of a public middle-high school, every year Josh has to train faculty, staff, and students on how to barricade doors in case of an active shooter. Every year we have mass shootings in this country with military style weapons in the hands of civilians. Every year there are unnecessary deaths at the hands of people with mental illness and access to firearms.

The military requires people to undergo rigorous training to be permitted to carry a weapon, and if someone in the military shows signs of mental illness their weapons privilege is revoked. We can extend these military principles into the civilian world, utilizing common sense background checks, prohibiting access to weapons for people who shouldn't have them, and mandating training for those that want to possess them.

The current state of weapons in America is that no one is safe, not the kids in our schools nor the adults who go out for a walk in the park. We can and must do better.

Improving our political discourse

We need to build bridges and work together. Politics can and should be a noble profession. If elected, Josh will work to make it so.

Between Josh’s experiences in the US Army Special Forces as a Green Beret, his service with the National Guard as an attorney, his leadership as a classroom teacher, and his time leading schools as a principal, Josh has worked alongside people of many different backgrounds, different races, ethnicities, genders and religious convictions.

In so doing, he has learned one important lesson: we’re not that different. The time has come to return to what we once were, and what we most Americans remain. United by belief in democratic rule -- who may vociferously disagree on issues of our time, but able to stay within the bounds of political decency -- able to engage in civilized discourse to reach mutually beneficial aims.