Kelly Clark thinks she can utilize her background in science to help change Medford for the better.
Kelly Clark is a scientist, so she sees things with a different perspective.
“I think scientists are more open to looking at different ways to get to the same bottom line,” she said while sitting at a picnic table on the grounds of Johnson’s Corner Farm in Medford. “Being open to different ideas, being open to experimenting. When something doesn’t work, we’ll learn from that.”
Clark, who’s running for Medford Town Council, isn’t afraid to be wrong. She, like all scientists, sees it as the only way to learn the right way of doing things.
“But also looking at what has worked in other places,” she said. “We don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. We can look at the data that have been produced from other towns and look at how they’ve made things work and how we can use that to our best advantage in our town.”
One of the things Clark thinks she can do better is find a better way to manage the town’s debt.
She thinks the town has paid off its debt too quickly. All the extra money going to paying down the debt could have gone to services for residents.
“The current administration has made the choice to pay down very aggressively at a time when interest rates are very low,” she said “So it’s a choice of do we want to spend that money in our town or do we want to use that money to pay back past debt in an aggressive manner that’s maybe not as necessary given our financial circumstances at the time. So I think we can find money in the budget by paying down the debt less aggressively and getting the people in the town what they need.”
Clark works as a chemistry teacher at Medford’s Lenape High School. She also has a degree in material science and engineering from Penn State.
“I always loved science…and chemistry was my biggest love,” she said. “Sharing my love for chemistry was my goal.”
Clark, who has been married for 13 years, has an 11-year-old daughter and is a member of the National Science Teachers Association and the American Association of Chemistry Teachers, the latter of which is a subdivision of the American Chemical Society.
Clark, who is running on the Democratic ticket, doesn’t feel Medford’s all-Republican council is representative of the township as a whole.
“We’re missing out on opportunities of representing those Independents and those Democrats,” she said. “I think we get the best ideas when we listen to more ideas. We can accumulate, we can brainstorm, we can find the best ideas when there’s more than one side represented on the council.”
