Artificial Intelligence is making its way into classrooms nationwide, but will it help or hurt Brockton’s students? Stephen Pina lays out his position: AI can track literacy, improve fiscal accountability, and prepare students for the future—but it must never replace teachers, erode discipline, or undermine parental rights.
Brockton’s schools didn’t lose $18.3 million to fraud—they lost it to incompetence. Taxpayers then paid another $400,000 for audits that confirmed what families already knew: weak leadership, rubber-stamp oversight, and broken systems.
Massachusetts law already requires annual audits, but in Brockton they’ve become little more than check-the-box exercises. Numbers get reconciled, but problems never get fixed.
Stephen Pina’s Audit Reform Plan changes that. It makes audits enforceable, public, and tied to results—protecting classrooms, restoring trust, and holding leaders accountable.
In Brockton, some want to hand even more power to the city’s Chief Financial Officer—putting one unelected bureaucrat in charge of school contracts. That’s not accountability; that’s red tape. Parents, taxpayers, and voters deserve a say in how money is spent on our schools.