Fair questions, straight answers.

Think of it as the board of directors for the district. The committee adopts the budget, sets policy, negotiates and approves contracts, and hires and evaluates the superintendent. It does not run schools day to day — that is the superintendent’s job — and it does not invent curriculum from scratch, since much of that framework comes from the state.

The honest version: it is an oversight job. Warwick Public Schools runs on roughly $203 million a year of public money, and the committee is the room where that money is supposed to get watched.

District 2 covers Wards 4, 5, and 6 — Riverview, Conimicut, Warwick Neck, Buttonwoods, and Oakland Beach, roughly the side of the city that runs along the bay.

If you are not sure which district you are in, the Secretary of State’s voter lookup at vote.sos.ri.gov will tell you from your address, along with your polling place.

Two other candidates filed for the seat in June 2026, and both withdrew over the summer, which left one name on the November ballot.

I do not read anything grand into that. School committee is unglamorous work with real homework attached, and fewer people volunteer for it than the job deserves. What I said during the campaign still holds: an uncontested race was a reason to do more homework, not less, because voters did not get the check an opponent would have provided.

I was elected on November 3, 2026, and I take my seat when the new term begins in January 2027. Until then I am not a member of the committee and have no vote, so for the next two months this site keeps doing what it did during the campaign: the monthly Plain-English Ledger on the Updates page, the Transparency pages, and my email.

I will be at the committee’s November and December meetings as a member of the audience, and the first thing I plan to do in January is keep reading the same documents I have been reading since the spring, with a vote attached.

I run brand and content marketing for a community-banking software company, and I founded a nonprofit that does policy research and testimony at the Rhode Island State House. Both jobs come down to the same skill: take something complicated and financial and explain it so a person without a finance degree can follow it.

That is the skill I intend to bring to the district’s budget. The longer story is on the Meet Dan page.

Email me at dan@herseyforwarwick.com. I read every message and respond personally, usually within two business days.

If it is about something specific in a school — a schedule, a bus route, a special-education meeting that is going nowhere — include enough detail that I can actually look into it. Until January I cannot act on it as a committee member, but I can tell you who at the district can, and I will follow up. Once seated, I will also hold open office hours at neighborhood libraries on a published schedule.