Editor’s note: So far four candidates have declared to run for the Ward 3 seat of the East Providence School Committee. Each candidate will get their own introductory article, in the order that interviews are conducted.

When Renee Ignacio lost her husband in 2012 to complications from ALS, she took a six-month break from her job as a bus monitor with the Bristol-Warren public school district, unable to work through the grief.

But it wound up being the job itself, and the children she interacted with while performing it, that would be the key to her finding a way back from the darkness.

“I always tell people, my kids on my bus taught me a lot. They taught me a lot about the world, believe it or not,” she said in a recent interview. “When I went back, they were the ones that got me through everything and they're the ones that got me back to work. The emotions of what the kids do for me is, I can't explain it. It's just amazing. And no matter how bad or how good they are, it's just something I connect with.”

Ignacio said that this appreciation and love for kids that has inspired her to run for the Ward 3 seat on the East Providence School Committee being vacated by its current chair, David Luiz. She said that being a part of their lives and educational careers during her 13-year tenure as a bus monitor in Bristol-Warren and her job as a special needs van driver for Ocean State Transit (driving for East Providence public schools from 2019 through 2025) taught her a lot about what goes on at schools.

“I watched them grow up from kindergarten to fifth grade and then I would see them through middle school and high school…I called them my kids,” she said. “And the more I learned from the kids, the more I saw that our school systems needed to change.”

One of Ignacio’s core tenants of her platform is improving special education outcomes. She said her own son had struggles that resulted in him nearly dropping out of high school, and a struggle with his IEP led her to file a lawsuit against the Rhode Island Department of Education.

She additionally thinks that the bullying policy needs to be made stronger to prevent it from happening to any child.

“I have kids that come on my vans and my school buses that would cry because they were getting bullied and picked on,” she said. “I had a student that just didn't want to go to school anymore and just didn't even want to be in life anymore because he was being bullied so bad.”

Another of her priorities would be improving transparency.

“You look at the budget and it's not a line-by-line item of where it's going,” she said.

Ignacio, who regularly attends every school committee meeting, said that she feels the current school committee doesn’t seem to work together as a cohesive team.

“I think they all need to work together,” she said. “It's supposed to be for the kids.”

She added that she feels some parents do not feel comfortable going to the committee with questions or concerns about their child’s education, which she would like to change.

“I think parents need to be more involved,” she said. “I think parents need to feel more comfortable to come to the school committee meeting and say, ‘Hey, listen, my kid isn't getting enough attention or they might need this or they might need that,’ and not be afraid…It's sad that a parent doesn't feel that they can go to somebody in authority. And I know, because I've had that feeling.”

Ignacio said that she would take her position on the school committee as an opportunity to be an advocate for the community and their questions about the district.

“Whatever the community needs. I'd like to, as a team and as a school committee, be able to work with it all,” she said.

A native of Bristol and a graduate of the 1989 class of Colt High School, Ignacio moved to East Providence in 1998 with her late husband right around the time her son was born. She has also been a stay-at-home mother, a caretaker to sick family members, and spent a year as a medical assistant before going back to bus monitoring. She currently works for Dattco driving statewide school vans.