Of the three new School Committee members, only one of them never attended a Sharon school. One of them is an attorney. One of them once worked in President Obama’s White House. One of them has a restaurant-reviewing website. And one of them emerged as the leader atop the hill of candidate votes. That one is named Daniel Newman. 

Newman grew up in Providence, R.I. At a young age, he moved from public to private school, learning about government, engineering, and financial supervision. All three of those fields sparked his interests. 

In college, Newman started work as an engineer. He moved on to work on national drug control policy at the White House. He ended up where he is now, as an attorney in financial industry supervision. 

He and his wife Adina were so drawn to Sharon that they decided to move here to raise a family. Adina had grown up in this area and had always wanted to live in Sharon, which soon became home for them.

When talking about Sharon with a high school journalism class, Newman said, “I love the small-town feel. Everywhere I go, I see faces I know. It makes it feel like a small, close-knit community.”

Moving to the Cottage District, Newman quickly became involved in the local schools when he joined the Cottage Street School PTO. He went a step further by running for and earning a spot on Cottage’s School Council, which is effectively the smaller, school-individualized School Committee. This experience left Newman wanting more. 

Education always has been an interest for him, as Newman comes from a family of teachers, with Adina an elementary teacher, his father a former high school principal, and his mother a former art teacher. 

As a Sharon resident, he made it a habit to watch School Committee meetings on a regular basis and act as a helping hand on social media platforms like Facebook by summarizing what happened “as factually and succinctly as [he] could,” he said. He loosely quoted from Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, in which the protagonist is told that “If you delete the adjectives, that [would] give you the facts.” 

He started doing so because he believes that “People need a reliable source of information they could go to after each [School Committee] meeting.” 

This year, he pulled and returned papers to run for School Committee. When he ran for election, Newman went from door to door asking residents what they felt needed improvement or changing in the schools.

“I wanted to get out and talk to people,” he said. And it worked. With more than 2,000 votes, Daniel easily made the School Committee, winning the race with the most votes of all seven candidates. 

When talking to Sharon High Talon reporters in early June,  Newman spoke a lot about the budget issues the town has had. 

“[The previous School Committee] was in a crunch. They didn’t do a full budget prioritization,” he said. He added that wasn’t the start of the problem, but it wasn’t the end. 

When describing the budget prioritization process, Newman said the School Committee should make a prioritized list of all the items the schools have bought, such as curriculum and educational tools for classrooms. He said the previous School Committee didn’t do that. In addition, he wants to create budgeting principles for the committee to follow. “When you start to think in terms of principles, then you don’t have to make repeat decisions,” Newman said. 

One of the most important investments the district can make is in teacher positions, he said, adding that it is important to keep manageable class sizes.

On the calendar:

When discussing the heated topic of the school calendar for next year, Newman keeps a cool head and prefers a data-driven approach based on absences.

“When we include a holiday on the calendar, it’s not because we think it is more important [than another holiday],” he said. “The schools can’t celebrate religious services. What they can do is recognize that there will be a lot of people out.”

On full-day kindergarten fees:

Newman opposes fees for full-day kindergarten and hopes to abolish the cost, saying, “It’s something people should expect from a modern school system.” 

He added, “We say we really value education here, ….I think that it should include full day kindergarten.”

Overall, Newman says he specializes in listening to real people’s problems and trying to see what it is that the people of Sharon need. 

“Most people say yes, they are having a good experience [with the Sharon Public Schools], and we should all be proud of that,” he said.