It’s unusually quiet for election season in Hoboken. In merely five weeks, three of the nine seats on the Hoboken Board of Education will be contested during the Nov. 4 general election. The three incumbents are running again, and their challengers have recently stepped up their critiques at school board meetings.
One reason for the tepid campaigning may be that the election has no chance of changing who controls the school board. Six of the nine current trustees were elected on the Kids First slate, which is associated with Mayor Dawn Zimmer. Two of the incumbents running are opponents of Kids First and the third has been allied with them, although she didn’t technically run on their slate.
That trustee, Monica Stromwall, was unanimously appointed by the board this past February after Carmelo Garcia resigned his seat to serve as a newly elected state Assemblyman. Stromwall has consistently voted with the Kids First majority since then, but will be running with her own slate called Parents for Progress, along with Sharyn Angley and Antonio Gray.
In fact, this year, no one is running under the “Kids First” banner–possibly because of division within the group’s ranks over policy toward the district’s charter schools. The Kids First members on the school board have opposed the expansion of the HoLa dual language charter school, while some past Kids First supporters, including the mayor, have been in favor of charter schools.
The two other incumbents running this year, Peter Biancamano and Frances Rhodes-Kearns, have often filled the role of the loyal opposition against Kids First, questioning the decisions of the majority at school board meetings.
From an initial field of 11, the number of candidates for the school board dwindled to eight after Barbara Reyes, Britney Montgomery, and Jackie Dowd Prince dropped out.
Biancamano and Rhodes-Kearns are teaming up to form the Education for all Children slate. A third slate, the Parents for Change slate, is composed of two former board candidates, Brian Murray (a frequent Kids First critic) and Patricia Waiters, as well as Lynn Danzker.
This will only be the third time a school board election is held in November. Board seats used to be contested in April, until the board voted in February 2012 to hold them in conjunction with general elections. The same reforms ended the practice of holding a yearly city-wide vote on the school budget in April. Now a vote is only held if the proposed budget increase is more than two percent.
Moving the school board elections has boosted turnout—the first November election in 2012 garnered 21,401 votes compared to 10,523 total votes the year before. The increased participation appears to have benefited Kids First candidates, who have won every seat since the change. Some have theorized that the younger voters who support Zimmer and Kids First only vote in general elections.
All of the candidates have been invited to answer questions from the public at a Candidates’ Forum organized by the Hoboken Quality of Life Coalition and The Elks on Oct. 8.
Cleaved by charters
The most controversial issue within Hoboken’s public schools over the past year has been the expansion of the Hoboken Dual Language Charter School (HoLa) to seventh and eighth grade. The state Department of Education approved the expansion this past March over the objections of then-Superintendent Dr. Mark Toback. The school board appealed the DOE’s decision, citing the pressure HoLa’s expansion places on the district’s budget and the allegedly segregative effect it has on Hoboken’s non-charter public schools. The lawsuit is currently pending in state appellate court.
Supporters of the lawsuit say the district is already hamstrung by rising costs and anemic state funding. Opponents counter that the school board is spending up to $50,000 in attorney’s fees to fight a school that is popular with many parents and offers a dual Spanish/English immersion program that is unique in the district.
Recently, the Parents for Change slate alluded to the issue in a joint statement, saying that “the BOE has polarized the community with their lawsuits.”
Charter schools are one of the few issues that divide the “reform” political coalition in Hoboken. Zimmer came out in favor of HoLa’s expansion, and City Council members associated with her have fallen on both sides of the issue. For example, Councilman David Mello has made favorable statements towards HoLa and was involved in a 2012 attempt to open a new charter school in Hoboken.
Even the Kids First majority, all of whom voted in favor of the HoLa lawsuit in March, has recently shown some internal disagreement over the school. In a September vote on adjusting a Sandy-related grant at the request of HoLa, four of the six Kids First members acceded to the charter school’s request.
Finding a superintendent
One of the key decisions for the board to make in the near future is the selection of a superintendent of schools. Toback resigned in August to become the superintendent of Wayne Public Schools, and the board appointed Dr. Richard Brockel to serve as interim Superintendent until a permanent replacement could be found.
Biancamano said picking a new superintendent is probably the most important choice the board will make in the next year. He has criticized his colleagues in the past for not promoting from within, and had nominated Assistant Superintendent Miguel Hernandez to fill the interim role in August.
Parents for Change emphasized the importance of finding a permanent superintendent who would stay long-term—the last two permanent superintendents lasted two and three years respectively. “There has been a constant turnover in the superintendent role,” they said. “This instability causes uncertainty for the teachers, lacks clear direction and vision for the district and equates to many lost dollars and time.”
Biancamano agreed. “A specific plan [for improving the schools] needs to begin at the top,” he said, “and the Hoboken schools have suffered from a constant revolving door of administrators.”
Scoring the schools
Biancamano suggested that the damage done by administrative uncertainty could be seen in Hoboken’s performance on state assessments. For the 2013-14 school year, the district saw a decline in some scores on the state’s Quality Single Accountability Continuum (QSAC). Though Hoboken’s public schools received scores above 90 percent in four out of five categories, they earned a 69 percent district score and a 45 percent county score for its instruction and program.
Hoboken’s instruction score had been 87 percent only four years ago.
At a recent school board meeting, Brian Murray argued that the district needs to set bigger goals than those presented by Brockel if it is going to be successful in improving its underperforming schools.
“We’re 99 yards from a touchdown, and these goals don’t move us a foot,” said Murray.
Monica Stromwall, who recently took over the chairmanship of the school board’s curriculum committee, defended the Hoboken’s school administration.
“Test scores are always a concern in any district, but steady progress is being made,” she said. The district’s steady application of consistent assessment and intervention programs are working and we will continue to support this.”
The Board of Education Candidates’ Forum will take place at 7 p.m. on Oct. 8, 2014 at the Elks Lodge at 1005 Washington St. For those who cannot attend, the forum will be videotaped and may be viewed later on Hoboken’s Cablevision Channel 78.
NOTE: An earlier version of this article inaccurately stated the name of a former candidate. It is Barbara Reyes, not Barbara Martinez.
Carlo Davis may be reached at cdavis@hudsonreporter.com.
SIDEBAR
Candidate was accused of anti-Semitic comments, and now downplays apologizing for them
Patricia Waiters, a perennial candidate for elections in Hoboken and a vocal speaker at City Council and Hoboken Housing Authority meetings, made comments at a May HHA meeting that several people considered anti-Semitic.
At the time, Waiters was a paid aide to Assemblyman Carmelo Garcia, the former head of the HHA. She has since resigned for unstated reasons.
At the meeting, she alleged that many real estate businesses with Jewish surnames had opened since Mayor Dawn Zimmer (who is Jewish) took office, and that Zimmer had only appointed Jews to city boards. “Since Dawn’s mayorship, we have a real estate place on every corner,” she said at the public meeting. “What is his name? Weitzman, Heller, Einstein, every corner, okay?”
The comment came up at a time when Zimmer was being accused of avoiding hiring minorities. A previous story in the Hoboken Reporter had noted a very low level of Latin Americans on the most powerful city boards.
At the next City Council meeting, David Mello, a city councilman and HHA board member, publicly condemned Waiters’ remarks and called on Garcia to remove her from his payroll. She declined to resign. But she did apologize for the comments in a letter to the Hoboken Reporter a few weeks later.
“I would ask anyone who I may have offended with my comments to forgive me for not making my points a little clearer,” she wrote in the June 8 letter. “Although I chose the wrong words, I truly believe the mayor’s policies regarding the lack of inclusion of any ethnic minorities to a board seat…is discriminatory. As an African-American woman, I have faced discrimination my entire life. So I cannot sit by and have people believe that I hold any bigotry in my heart.”
In an interview this past week, Waiters denied being anti-Semitic, saying that she didn’t even know how to pronounce the word. However, she also took back the letter.
Waiters said that the letter had been drafted by Chris Campos, another Garcia aide and a former Hoboken councilman, and that she was “a little bit ashamed” by it.
“I don’t feel I have to apologize for something that’s true,” said Waiters.