The Hoboken Board of Education is about to get a bit of a shakeup after reform candidate Theresa Minutillo came in first place in Tuesday’s Board of Education election.
With all but one of the city’s 36 precincts counted as of Friday (see sidebar), Minutillo (1,670) was followed by political newcomer Capt. Anthony Romano (1,632) and incumbent Frank Raia (1,628). Romano and Raia both ran on Mayor David Roberts’ ticket. The top three vote-getters are elected to the nine-member volunteer board.
As of Friday morning, there was one cartridge from an electronic voting machine that had yet to be counted. Incumbent Wanda Santana-Alicea (1,522) came in fifth. Minutillo’s runningmates, former board member Carrie Gilliard (1,294) and accountant William Tobias (1,225) came in fifth and sixth place respectively.
But while the missing vote cartridge probably won’t affect who won the election, it certainly could affect the vote on the district’s $51 million budget, which as of Friday was up only by a perilous 11 votes.
How did Minutillo win? The surprise isn’t that Minutillo finished in the top three. It was clear that her campaign was gaining traction. Also, no one worked harder and knocked on more doors over the past several weeks.
But what is somewhat surprising is that she finished first.
Minutillo, a 17-year resident of Hoboken, owns a company that works with women to develop their corporate image. She first got involved with Hoboken schools three years ago when she voluntarily created Senior Prep Day, which helped non-college-bound students prepare for their lives after high school graduation. Since then she has regularly attended Board of Education meetings.
“I’m thrilled and honored to be on the board and look forward toward making a difference,” Minutillo said Tuesday night, shortly after she learned of her victory.
The last time reformers ran a ticket of candidates was in 1994. For more than a decade, the prevailing mayor has always backed a successful school ticket.
But this year’s election clearly shows that there is a segment of the public that wants more accountability at the Board of Education, and hopes that Minutillo, an expectant mother, will stir the pot.
Contracts to professionals One of Minutillo’s top priorities will be to advocate for a fair process when it comes to issuing contract to professionals.
In the past, after an election, the board would vote to give contracts to firms that supported the winning ticket. Minutillo said that instead of handing out the same patronage contracts, this year they should all be bid out in a public process.
“We need to get the best company or contractor for the job,” she said.
She added that before the board even approves the first contract, it should set its educational priorities.
“It’s been a long time since people have heard the board members talk about the students,” said Minutillo. “Not a single contract should be handed out until we find funding for music or art or vocational programs.”
Those programs have been cut in the past few years in an effort to save money. It is hard to cut salaries, as most of the district’s teachers have tenure, but the district has moved forward in recent years in offering buyouts.
Another goal of Minutillo is to bring the Connors Primary School downtown up to the same levels and standards as the uptown Wallace School, which currently has higher test scores and more parental involvement.
Police captain/professor Another surprise Tuesday was the second place performance of Capt. Anthony Romano, who had finished fifth out of six candidates running as an independent in last year’s council election. Running on the mayor’s ticket certainly helped, but Romano also ran a positive campaign, and is well known throughout the city.
Romano, a born-and-raised Hoboken resident, is a captain in the Hoboken Police Department, where he oversees the Community Policing Bureau. He has an undergraduate degree from St. Peter’s College and a master’s from Jersey City University. Currently, he is an adjunct professor of sociology St. Peter’s College. For seven years he taught history at Hoboken High School.
“I’m very honored by the number of votes I received and I will strive to earn this support,” Romano said. “I believe in unity and I plan to work with all members of the board.”
Romano said that his first priority will be to return the district to a kindergarten-through-eighth grade alignment. “I want to go in there open-minded, and I want everyone to know that I’m not part on any faction,” Romano said.
Raia wants to bring back machine shop, create academic high Coming in third was developer and incumbent Raia, who has been a member of the HOPES Head Start Board of Trustees, and was a longtime a board member of the North Hudson Sewerage Authority. In his second term, Raia hopes to restart the vocational programs that have been dropped from in the schools. He would like to bring back wood shop, machine shop, and mechanical drawing. He is also an advocate for creating an “academic high school” for some of the more advanced students.
Political implications Reading the tea leaves of Hoboken’s political landscape can sometimes be a difficult task, but given the results of Tuesday’s election, a couple of things became evident.
Typically, when the mayor of the city supports a ticket, there is a block of voters who will vote straight down the line for those three candidates. So what happened?
Roberts’ ticket was widely considered a “fusion” ticket, where each of the candidates had their own constituency. This led to a fractured vote where a large number of people voted for only one or two candidates on the ticket. Complicating matters for the past year has been a sizable feud between Board of Education President Carmelo Garcia and former board President Frank Raia. The two haven’t seen eye to eye on political, administrative or policy issues.
Garcia is a close ally and supporter of Alicea, who ended up coming in fourth. So what likely happened is that a large number of Raia supporters didn’t vote for Alicea, and a large number of Alicea and Garcia supporters didn’t vote for Raia.
This led to Alicea’s fourth place finish, and to Raia, who came in first just three years ago, relatively weak third place finish.
Romano and Minutillo benefited.
Alicea said Tuesday night that she is disappointed, but that she thinks that Minutillo will do a good job on the board.
“It is what it is,” Alicea said. “But I think [Minutillo] really has her heart in it. I know she’ll do a good job.” Budget vote in limbo The old adage that every vote counts was never truer than it was in regard to the vote on the school board budget. As of Friday morning, the $51 million spending plan was up by 11 votes, but a missing cartridge from a voting machine might change the outcome.
If the budget fails, it then goes to the Hoboken City Council for changes and possibly further cuts.
The cartridge was left in an electronic machine. When it was recovered, it had to be taken to a warehouse in Jersey City so that Hudson County Clerk Javier Inclan could get a court order to open it.
The close vote was telling. It said that a large number of voters were not satisfied with how the Board of Education spends its money, or with their perception of such. The budget will use over $32 million in local taxes, although this is not an increase.
According to the proposed budget, the district is anticipating 2,175 students next year, not including the two public charter schools. If that number is divided by $51.2 million, the amount of spending minus the money given to the charter schools, it costs an average of nearly $22,000 to educate each public school student. That includes amounts for transportation and special education programs covered by federal and state grants.
There was some lobbying against the budget. The reform ticket, headed by Theresa Minutillo, has said that the $51 million budget contained wasteful spending that was inflated by unnecessary contracts with politically connected firms.
Complicating matters was the convoluted way which Mayor David Roberts addressed this budget. Roberts, politically speaking, was in a difficult position this election. Until Tuesday, all nine members of the board were elected under Roberts’ banner. Those members – for the past six years – have approved school board budgets, which Roberts has supported.
But during and since last year’s mayoral election Roberts has made improving education in Hoboken one of his top priorities. Recently he has been highly critical of the district’s spending.
If Roberts’ were to launch a “no” campaign on the budget, it would, essentially undercut his ticket of candidates. So what ended up happening was that Roberts didn’t publicly lobby voters to vote down the budget, but at the same time, he was highly critical of the budget. Some say that behind the scenes he was directing his allies to vote “no.”
Also contributing to the budget’s demise was an ongoing feud in the press between Roberts and Superintendent of Schools’ Patrick Gagliardi. Gagliardi accused Roberts of bashing to schools for his own political gain.