Meet the Candidate
Dan Hersey
A journalist by training, a marketer by trade, a new dad by good fortune, and now a candidate by choice.
I grew up in Poughkeepsie, met Tara at college in Vermont, and after a couple of years in the Bay Area we came east and settled into her childhood home on Mill Cove Road in Warwick. Our daughter Charlotte is ten months old, and I’m running for District 2 because the committee that shapes the district she grows up in needs members who treat the operational side of the job at least as seriously as the political side.
Poughkeepsie to Lyndon to Warwick
I grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, and after high school I went north for college at Lyndon State, in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. I graduated in 2014 with a journalism degree, and that training is the part of my education I find myself thinking about most often on this campaign. A journalist’s job is to take something genuinely complicated and translate it into something a reader can follow, and that is a great deal of what I think a school committee can do better.
I met Tara at Lyndon. She graduated two years after I did, in 2016, and we moved west together to the Bay Area for work. We spent two good years out there and could have built a life if that had been the decision we wanted to make. We came home instead, in 2019, to Rhode Island and to the house Tara grew up in on Mill Cove Road. We bought it from her parents when they moved.
That is the Warwick story. I am not a native, but I have chosen this place as deliberately as anyone can choose a hometown. The house we live in is the house my wife grew up in, her family runs through this city, and now mine does too.
What I do for a living
I run brand and content marketing for a community-banking software company whose product helps community banks and credit unions hold and transact Bitcoin alongside their other services. The day-to-day work is to take something genuinely complicated, including how a small bank or credit union actually operates with a product like that, and translate it into something a person can read without a finance degree. The journalism training underneath that work is the part that matters most here.
A school committee ought to treat its own budget at least as seriously as I treat my employer’s product. Warwick Public Schools runs on roughly $203 million a year. Out-of-district special-education tuition was $10.4 million in the most recent audited year (FY23), has roughly doubled since 2017, and runs over $21,000 per pupil for placements the district is legally required to fund. The Boston Globe and the city Budget Commission have both pegged the structural deficit at roughly $9 million. Two replacement high schools are under construction on a $350 million bond that voters approved in 2022. These are not small numbers, and they deserve members of this committee who can read them carefully, explain them in language a parent can follow, and approach the hard parts honestly.
How I’ll Work
Three commitments to District 2.
Not a list of promises. A standard for how I show up.
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Account for every dollar
My job, day to day, is to take complicated financial material and translate it into language a non-expert can follow. I think a school committee should treat its own budget with at least that level of care. The work means actual transparency rather than the appearance of it, regular reporting on contract performance, and a habit of asking the underlying data questions until somebody can answer them.
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Be straight with parents
Plain language, no spin, no movement vocabulary. If a contract is bad I will say so, if a vote is hard I will explain the reasoning behind mine, and if a parent asks a question they will get an answer rather than a press statement. Public bodies tend to default to hedging, and I do not plan to bring more of that habit into this one.
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Show up between elections
A school committee member should be present in the neighborhoods between elections, not just in the weeks before one. The actual habits are not complicated: open office hours at the library on a published cadence, visits to schools across the district on regular days, and being reachable by email and phone the way a sitting member ought to be.
I want to hear from you.
Tell me what’s on your mind about Warwick schools. I read every message.