Name: Lana Panasyuk
Address: 28 Saddle Club Road
Office Sought: School Committee
e-mail address: lana [at] panaworks.us
phone number: 781-325-2209

Community Activities: 

• With two older sons who graduated from LHS and three younger kids in middle and high school, I’ve spent 26 years volunteering in the LPS community, focusing on hands-on learning. My contributions include teaching robotics (leading to a State Championship), science clubs and fairs, math clubs, and coaching youth hockey and soccer. I’ve also led 70+ Big Backyard walks and been involved in various class activities. At Fiske, I served on the Board of Directors for the Afterschool Program, introduced the first electronic school news while serving on the PTO board, and was a Site Council member.
• Living in Precincts 5-6 for 26 years, I’ve contributed and participated in numerous neighborhood activities, connected with lots of parents who have kids as little as newborns to as old as 40 and beyond.

The schools have a two million deficit in the FY 2025 budget. Can you describe the reasons for the deficit and how the committee plans to reconcile their budget?

It is my understanding that the deficit occurred due to two reasons: 1) insufficient buffer in the budget that didn’t anticipate an increase in academic and emotional student support due to the effects of pandemic – learning and social-emotional deprivation due to unnecessary prolonged remote learning (the need will continue to grow); 2) slow response rate to the needs of community adjusting to the normality of education, e.g. increased need to the face-to-face learning and back to pen-and-paper (more student-facing teaching), versus continuing IT and computer-support spending levels to support remote learning.

If elected, I plan to work together with the committee members and town’s financial support to evaluate and properly project an increasing need in student-facing staff, blurring between-school-district boundaries to accommodate unequal student/teacher distribution to provide high quality education and instruction for all children across the town of Lexington. I would encourage all of us (including SB and TMMs) to look for funds distribution within the budget to eliminate any future possibility of such a destructive event as budget freeze in the middle of the year.