Maria Solanki says growing up as a blind, special needs child makes her an asset to the Pinellas School Board

This is part of a series of profiles of candidates for Pinellas County School Board in 2022.

Florida Politics invited each contender in the race to take part in a seven-question interview — giving them an opportunity to talk about qualifications, platforms and priorities.

Maria Di Fiore Solanki is running for Pinellas County School Board District 7.

Here is our conversation with Solanki:

Florida Politics: What are three important qualities and/or qualifications you have that will make you an effective asset on the Pinellas County School Board?

Maria Di Fiore Solanki: One of the first qualities has to do with my background and experience with budgets. That is one of the main functions of a School Board member is to approve funds and allocate funds.

Having worked in my own business and my father’s business, I know how to cut wasteful spending. This is so important so that we can pay teachers more, we can pay bus drivers and cafeteria workers more, and we can make sure that every penny is being well spent so we can get our kids educated.

Another quality that I have is working with a lot of children with special needs. I myself am legally blind, so having been a special needs kid gives me a unique perspective. My entire education career, I’ve worked with kids with trauma and in orphanages and with kids involved with sex trafficking.

We have a serious mental health issue in our schools right now. We need people that put this as a focus and put real solutions into solving it, and I’m sure we’ll get into this more later in the interview, but I think this is the root cause of a lot of school violence, and that definitely needs to be addressed.

I think outside of the box, and I look at the child holistically. From living on three different continents and in multiple states, I bring a lot of experience and a diverse perspective to the board.

And one of those things is noticing how important nutrition is for schools and for students. And overall, I look at this child as a whole person; we can’t just dissect a child and expect good grades. We need to make sure that child is grounded and well-balanced, and the good grades will follow.

I have a focus on nutrition. I have a focus on getting kids outside more with less screen time. I think the whole experience that I bring to the table is very important.

FP: Why do you want to serve on the Pinellas County School Board?

Solanki: This goes back to my background. As I mentioned, I am legally blind. I’ve been a special needs student my entire education career. I also lost my mother when I was four years old to breast cancer, and I saw how my father had to raise four children by himself.

When you lose your mom at that early age, it does something to you. It’s almost therapeutic to help other children because you know the pain that you had growing up, and I feel this is the best way that I can give back to the community. I’ve been blessed, and in so many ways I’ve been blessed even with the challenges that I’ve had. I think this is the best way to use all my experiences to help the most amount of students possible.

I see so many schools are failing. Seventy-five percent of third graders cannot read at a third-grade proficiency. Half the elementary schools make the lowest performing schools list for the entire state of Florida here in District 7.

And I know that when kids aren’t educated, they get into trouble. They can go to jail or (Juvenile Detention Centers) because they start acting up in class, then they take it to the streets and end up in jail. All of this is infuriating to me being the mother of a biracial child, and my heart breaks for these kids. So, yeah, this is my way of being able to give back.

FP: What are the top three priority issues you feel? The Pinellas County School Board needs to address, and how do you believe they should be addressed?

Solanki: The three issues I would say are the low-performing school, which goes along with the literacy rates, the mental health and nutrition of children plus the wasteful spending. They all tie in. Because if we can find out how to cut our wasteful spending, we can direct this money to the low-performing schools and to the mental health issues.

So, to address the wasteful spending, I think we need to go department by department and have a full-on audit of where money is being wasted.

When I reach out to people in each department, they immediately start giving me lists. And these lists can be $200,000 items. Sometimes they’re $50,000, and sometimes they’re more than this.

One thing that I have brought up is that schools are, for example, putting air conditioning so low that everyone’s freezing inside. We just need to be sustainable and eco-friendly in general. But on top of it, when we’re spending millions a year on electricity bills, then we need to go in and take a hard look at this. If this was our home, we wouldn’t just put our AC to 50 degrees or 60 degrees. We have to be wise at how we spend dollars.

If we have the intention of, let’s save as much money as possible so we can pay our staff, our teachers, our bus drivers, our cafeteria workers more, then we’ll find ways to cut.

Then there is the mental health component. I will keep coming back to this as a top priority. We feed kids breakfast, lunch and snacks. Twenty percent of children are obese. One out of every three people diagnosed with diabetes is a child. So we get these kids sick from the food we’re feeding them.

They then go to the doctors where they’re overmedicated. When they’re overmedicated, that has a whole list of side effects, including clogging their cognitive abilities to process information. They get other diseases from being on medication. It is a vicious cycle. So it’s time we look at children holistically.

Well, then many of them cannot afford medication. They can’t afford doctor visits. And yet we continue to give them food that makes them sick. Let’s just give them food that nourishes their bodies, that supports mental clarity and mental balance and well-being.

Then, of course, the literacy rate and the low-performing schools is a top priority. As I said, kids start acting out when in class very innocently, when they first don’t understand information, and then they’ll get sent to the principal’s office and they lose even more time in the classroom. Then they are constantly told or they start to feel that they’re bad.

So as a coping mechanism, they start acting the way that they feel, like adults are talking about them. From there they get into trouble on the streets, and as I said, they go to the streets and get in trouble, which leads them to jail. And if they don’t end up in jail, they may not even graduate from high school, or they somehow graduate, but haven’t really earned that degree. They’re just kind of passed along, so they don’t become productive members of society.

We need to address that. And one of the ways is making sure kids are matched to the right program and not matched to their zip code. There are so many options out there for students, whether it’s the magnet schools, a private school, a charter school, which are public schools or a fundamental school. Let’s match that child to the right program.

Whether that’s something in the arts or that’s something using their hands — we need to find that program. Just because their zip code puts them at a certain school doesn’t mean that that’s what interests them or will be best for them.

When kids are passionate about learning, they retain information more and they’re excited about it. So, we can’t just say one size fits all, we’re students. We need to really value the uniqueness of each child, no cookie cutter programs. And I think that will get kids thriving.

FP: What will you do to advocate for teachers if elected to the Pinellas County School Board?

Solanki: When I reached out to various teachers, what I hear a lot is a lack of autonomy. Everything is just so bureaucratic. It’s robotic, and they lose passion for teaching, which is why they went into this field. Not because of the paycheck, but because they really had a passion for helping kids.

I had one teacher who told me she just wanted to put a bird feeder outside her classroom, and the principal said no because it would make a mess. And she wanted to use it for art, for journaling, for science. And I mean, think of what this does to a grown woman who can’t even put a bird feeder outside of her classroom.

So we need to bring back this autonomy to teachers so they can be creative with their curriculum and getting things out there to kids, because that energy is picked up by the kids. They understand, they feel when the teacher is excited about what they put together, and then they get excited. When students are passionate about learning, they retain more information.

Another thing that should be considered is potentially providing affordable housing to teachers. Now, I taught at the American Embassy School, and the packages that were given to teachers abroad included housing. A few years ago, Pinellas County Schools sold off a surplus of buildings that were vacant for years. This is definitely something that we should consider if we can provide affordable housing to teachers because $47,000 a year and change, you end up taking home about $2,500 a month.

It’s challenging with rates going up across the Tampa Bay area for teachers to make ends meet on their current income. Plus, teachers need time for planning and meeting with parents, especially for students with special needs and IEPs. We need to find a way to give them that dedicated time during the workday.

FP: Most Pinellas County school students are too young to vote, obviously, but if they could vote, why should they vote for you?

Solanki: I look at the child from 360 degrees. Every aspect of it, myself being special needs means that I advocate for the nearly 15% of children that are special needs. I want to find that program that best fits each child. I don’t want them sitting in class all day, bored and not interested.

I really want to customize the education plan for as many children as possible so they can be excited about learning whether that’s a technical program that we match them to or that’s a performing arts program. I want to invite as much innovation into our county as possible so that kids love going to school every single day.

We grow up in so many different professions and make our own lives as adults. Why do we think that all kids should be in the same classroom? I don’t think that. I think we need to find what interests that child and design the programs accordingly for the group of children that have similar interests so we can keep them engaged.

FP: What role does the School Board play in addressing performance gaps among students in the classroom, particularly those who have specific needs?

Solanki: So again, aligning the student with the program that best interests them is going to help so many students. Not to mention it will help so many teachers because no teacher wants a child who is not interested in their studies and is being a distraction in the classroom as a result.

So, we can help get those kids into the program that interests them. Then they’ll make everyone happier. For myself, being a special needs person, I’m an advocate for these children and for the families who often haven’t been heard or they’re not getting that attention. I know what it’s like to have been bullied for being special needs even in college, so they can always count on me to be an advocate for them.

FP: School safety is a topic on many people’s minds from school shootings and violence or bullying on campus to general disruptive behavior and even the need to keep kids safe from infectious diseases. At best, these issues can be a major distraction to learning. At worst, they can be deadly. What are your thoughts on the needs and strategies to keep students safe at school?

Solanki: This has been a huge focus of my campaign. I’ve been working in the mental health field, especially with two children, teenagers, for nearly 20 years.

Let’s start with the virus. We need to keep those online program options open for families who feel safer or find that to be the most conducive learning environment for them and their families as far as the virus goes. I think we need to pay the most attention to boosting our immune systems.

And again, this goes back to nutrition. When I first started talking about nutrition, I mean, most families and kids are like, yes, I love it. There were a handful of people that would question me. Is this really a top priority for a School Board race? And the more I am given the opportunity to explain it, the more they are understanding why what we put into our body is so important.

And this is definitely the case when fighting diseases or preventing diseases, including preventing any sort of side effects from the virus.

But it doesn’t stop there when we talk about school violence. I have done a number of seminars and workshops with experts from across the country, and it always comes back to mental health. It is not one piece of equipment. It is not one piece of security.

It really comes back to mental health. Security on campus is critical. But mental health has always been the focal point of every single one of these seminars and workshops they’ve gone to. Why? Because every one of these shooters has been known for having mental health issues, and the majority of them had been connected to the school one way or another and had informed other students that the shooting was going to happen or something was going to happen.

So for me, it’s like what happens with fires in our homes. We first try to prevent the fire by making sure we don’t have any faulty wiring, by making sure we turn things off, keep flammable items out of reach for catching on fire. The next thing we do is have a system in place to alert us when there is a fire, and the final step is putting out the fire. But the first step is trying to prevent that fire.

And the same thing needs to happen with mental health. My solution goes back to nutrition. If we are clogging these kids up by overmedicating them, we are ruining their chemical balance and creating a chemical imbalance in their bodies. So many medications have mental health issues, specifically depression, as a side effect. And we need to address the overmedication problem by providing proper nutrition to the students.

We need to get kids outside more. When I tour the schools, I see that they close even the blinds and the curtains because they have the students on iPads. So often, I think we need to get kids outside more, even for a reading or a history class, have them connected to the ground.

I always say this, not just the hippie-dippy, hokey pokey stuff. I will fully admit I am an old hippie, but this is proven science that when we are connected to the ground, we are balanced, we release endorphins. And overall, this is just positive for our chemical balance. Getting kids in the garden, getting them under that tree, getting them in the sunshine is part of their mental health strategy.

Because if they’re on an iPad for hours at school, then they go home, so many kids are sitting inside. You don’t see them at the parks as much. You don’t see them riding their bikes as much. And we’ve been out door knocking. We hardly see kids out on the street anymore. It’s not like how it was in the eighties or in the nineties when I was growing up.

So, it’s really important for schools to encourage this. We will have better mental health for our students if we get them outside more, because what we’re seeing now is not what we’ve seen when I was in school when it comes to mental health issues.