2024 Annual Meeting

Join us Tuesday, December 10, at 7pm by Zoom to help us honor and celebrate the decisive win for the Yes on 2 Campaign and these three Champions of Public Education: Dr. Shelley Scruggs, Deborah McCarthy and Beth Kontos (left to right).

Dr. Shelley Scruggs served as the lead petitioner on the first ballot initiative submitted in 2023 to remove the MCAS requirement for high school graduation. She is the parent of a student at Minuteman Regional Technical Vocational High School, and resides in Lexington. She joined forces with the Massachusetts Teachers Association in the fall of 2023 to support their ballot initiative which culminated in Question 2. She earned her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Princeton and her PhD from the University of Michigan. She has been employed as a member of technical staff at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory for 31 years, where she currently works in the Space Division.

Deb McCarthy is an educator with 25 years’ experience in the classroom. She is currently serving her second term as the Vice-President of the MTA. Deb regards Citizens for Public Schools as a cornerstone in the fight for public schools that all learners and communities deserve. CPS was in the forefront for the win on Question Two and Deb looks forward to continuing the coalition work with Citizens for Public Schools ensuring that public education continues to be the foundation of our democracy.

Beth Kontos serves as Vice President of the North Shore Labor Council and served as President of AFT Massachusetts from 2018 to 2024. Beth started her career as a computer programmer before becoming a Social Studies teacher in 2004 and spent the next 20 years teaching, mentoring, and challenging her students to grow and become lifelong learners. While teaching, she also served first as Vice President, then as President of the Salem Teachers Union.

With coalition partners, Beth fought against charter expansion in 2016, worked on the Fund our Future campaign which led to the Student Opportunity Act in 2019, and fought to pass the Fair Share Amendment to increase funding for both public education and public transportation in 2022. Most recently she worked on the ballot campaign to end the use of MCAS as a graduation requirement. Working to change the failed MCAS system has been a career long goal for Beth and she still believes there is much work to do to end the way MCAS results are used to sort and punish our school districts. Her work to ensure educational equity is not finished as she continues to advocate for equitable admissions to vocational schools without restrictive criteria.

In retirement, she will continue her roles in the labor movement supporting fully funded public institutions like schools and libraries, as well as equitable solutions to climate change. Her newest role will be a labor of love, caring for her granddaughter “Baby Kay.”

Beth has a Bachelor’s Degree in History and Spanish and a Master’s in History from
Salem State University. She raised her daughters Katie and Rebecca in Danvers where she still resides with her partner John Neilson. Together, they spend summers in their kayaks on Great East Lake in Wakefield, N.H.

CPS members and non-members are welcome!

Our annual meeting is a time to celebrate our accomplishments, discuss our goals for the year ahead and elect members of our board of directors. With your support and participation, we can build on all of our recent victories - keeping the cap on charter schools, increasing state funding for our schools, supporting the Fair Share Amendment to increase funding for K-12 and higher education, and ending the MCAS graduation requirement - and turn our vision for public education justice into a reality.

To see whether you need to update your membership, email Lisa Guisbond, here.

We are grateful to our individual and organizational sponsors for helping us to continue CPS’s work. (Make a sponsoring donation to CPS and we will list your name in the program.)