The Hoboken Reporter has been profiling all three slates running for the Hoboken Board of Education in the election on Tuesday, Nov. 4. Last week, we profiled Parents for Progress. The following installment takes a look at the Parents for Change slate. For older stories, see the Hoboken section of hudsonreporter.com.
Of all the slates running for the three open seats on the Hoboken Board of Education this year, Parents for Change has been perhaps the most open in their criticism of the school board’s current Kids First majority. Anyone who regularly attends school board meetings is familiar with Brian Murray’s litany of damning statistics about the Hoboken Junior Senior High School. Patricia Waiters also is well-known for the passionate speeches she delivers at the school board and other municipal meetings as a self-fashioned people’s advocate. If elected together, the slate of Murray, Waiters, and Lynn Danzker would likely form a loud and loyal opposition to the school board majority.
However, the Parents for Change slate also possesses a strong vision for how the school board could be run better, focusing on the development of long-term goals, greatly expanded dialogue with the larger community, and securing a committed superintendent. According to the slate, the current school board has proven itself unable or unwilling to pursue these steps, which they say could drastically improve the quality of the Hoboken’s public education.
Parents for Change also represent the vanguard of the Hoboken political coalition bound by a mutual dislike and distrust of Mayor Dawn Zimmer. Their campaign is being managed by Joseph Branco, a close affiliate of state assemblyman and former school board president Carmelo Garcia, who has clashed frequently with Zimmer, Kids First’s most prominent backer. Interestingly, Garcia has expressed support for Parents for Change over the Education for All Children slate, who served as his running mates for the school board in 2011.
“The approach that’s being taken is not moving the ball forward…”—Brian Murray
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Patricia Waiters did not respond to multiple interview requests via email for this article.
Improving the high school
Parents for Change say the school board’s lack of attentiveness to community concerns has led parents to avoid or pull their kids out of the school district, and particularly the Junior Senior High School. Improving the High School has a personal element for these candidates; each has at least one child in the lower grades in Hoboken public schools, and each wants to send his or her child to the High School but is concerned about its quality.
“We’re parents,” said Murray, “and we’ve seen over the last six years and even before that that the approach that’s being taken is not moving the ball forward for families to buy into the high school as a future for their children.”
He cited the high school’s ranking in the bottom 20 percent of New Jersey Monthly’s 2014 school rankings, and the below average SAT scores. He also cited a report on Patch.com about per capita incidents of violence in New Jersey high schools during the 2012-13 school year, as Hoboken High was one of the higher ranked schools.
At the last school board meeting, Interim Superintendent Richard Brockel and members of the Kids First majority touted the district’s gains on last year’s standardized testing, including a 7.3 percent increase in the number of 11th graders scoring proficient or advanced proficient in English Language Arts. But Murray noted that the fraction of high school students scoring “advanced proficient” alone decreased in both ELA and math. “We’re raising the bottom at the expense of the top,” he said.
The High School “is not offering the majority of the community what they want in their education or what they want for their children,” wrote the slate in an email, “so we as the board need to reach out to that community and find out what it is that they need or what it is that they want so that they can send their kids to that high school.”
Some have questioned the relationship between Murray’s profession and his potential service on the board. As a real estate agent with Empire Realty Group, Murray is behind HobokenToTheBurbs.com, a website that educates those who want to move from Hoboken to the suburbs, a decision sometimes triggered by the perceived quality of the schools. At the Fall Arts and Music Festival, Murray manned a Hoboken to the Burbs stand that included a poster displaying the top 200 school districts in New Jersey according to New Jersey Monthly, of which Hoboken is not one.
Murray said he saw no contradiction between the two roles.
“I’m not sending anybody out of town,” he said. “People have a real need to move and there’s a lot of challenges to that, and I’m serving the community by helping them transition…I would much rather them stay.”
Murray added that the higher property values that come with better schools would only help his business as a Realtor.
Terminating turnover
Parents for Change has singled out the turnover in superintendents as one of the most damaging factors leading to a lack of quality in Hoboken’s public schools. “No ability to set strategy and implement or prosper can come from lack of stability,” said Danzker.
There have been at least five interim or permanent superintendents in Hoboken in the last seven years.
Hoboken is not the only district that has struggled to maintain continuity in upper level administration. A 2014 dissertation by Rutgers Doctor of Education candidate Kersti Kolu found an average tenure of 2.7 years for superintendents in New Jersey K-12 school districts. Contributing factors identified by education experts include the end of superintendent tenure in 1991 and the capping of superintendent salaries under Gov. Chris Christie.
Parents for Change lays the blame for the departure of superintendents squarely on the current school board majority. The revolving door, said Murray, “is a function of choosing the right people, and clearly the Kids First team over the last five to seven years has not.”
Danzker said her 18 years of experience as an executive recruiter give her a unique advantage in judging candidates.
Setting goals
According to Murray, part of the reason superintendent turnover is so damaging is that the school board does not clearly delineate its long-term goals for the district, allowing each interim and permanent superintendent to pursue his own initiatives until he decides to leave or is forced out.
Murray says the current system, in which one-year goals are set by the superintendent, is short-sighted. He also criticized Superintendent Brockel for having “created and presented his own goals with no prompting of the board.” On Wednesday, Brockel explained that school districts were statutorily required to set yearly goals, but did not explicitly say that superintendents were required to produce them.
“The BOE must set a long term high end agenda,” said Murray. “They must have clear, complete goals with timeframes so that all decisions being made are being made toward those goals.”
Areas in which Murray thinks the board should set goals include building new facilities, raising SAT scores, and raising standardized test scores.
Community feedback
Another key goal of Parents for Change is revamping the way the school board runs in order to absorb more ideas from the Hoboken community at large. Danzker views the current board subcommittee system, in which most meetings are closed to the public and attended by only board members and school administrators, with derision.
“If the same people are going to the same subcommittee meetings, how are you getting ideas?” she asked. “How are you expanding? How are you reaching out to the community? How are you setting up checks and balances?”
“There should be subcommittees where there are teachers or administrators or even students that are in the program,” said Danzker. “On the Finance Committee, we should have a Hoboken resident who is a financial planner or a CPA or works in investment banking. On the Curriculum Subcommittee, we should appoint a resident who is in education administration or is a teacher. “Right now, there is no vested interest [in the community] because nobody is opening their arms and embracing this community that has more resources than probably any community in the state.”
Charter school controversy
Although they are not running on a charter-focused ticket, Parents for Change are clear in their support for the expansion of the Hoboken Dual Language Charter School (HoLa) and the concept of charters in general. The school board majority and candidate Monica Stromwall have voted to take legal action against the state-sanctioned expansion of that school.
Danzker has a fourth grader in HoLa and has organized fundraisers for the school in the past.
“One of the areas that really sets Hoboken apart from many of our other Hudson County schools is that we have choice,” said Danzker. “Choice gives a lot of opportunity to people who have different ideas of how they want their kids to be educated.”
Danzker said she would judge any new proposals for charter schools in the district on a case-by-case basis. “If the public demands it, then we have to listen to the public,” she said.
Danzker also mentioned that she was working with Assemblyman Garcia and New Jersey Education Commissioner David Hespe to change the funding formula so that charters are funded directly by the state rather than through local tax levies. The reform, she said, would solve most of the debate around charter schools.
Waiters’ running mates respond to allegations of anti-Semitic comments
Waiters has been a magnet for controversy in the Hoboken political community this year due to statements she made at an April Hoboken Housing Authority board meeting that some construed as anti-Semitic. Waiters, who is black, had hoped to be appointed to the HHA board by the City Council, and in light of the decision to appoint two white commissioners, she alleged that many real estate businesses with Jewish surnames had opened since Mayor Zimmer (who is Jewish) took office, and that Zimmer had only appointed Jews to city boards.
A Hoboken Reporter story around that time pointed out that there are very few members of minority groups in top positions in the city.
“Since Dawn’s mayorship, we have a real estate place on every corner,” she said at the April public meeting. “What is his name? Weitzman, Heller, Einstein, every corner, okay?”
Waiters published a letter in The Hoboken Reporter shortly after, apologizing for the comments. But last month, she said she didn’t actually agree with the letter and that a political colleague had written it for her.
When Danzker, who won a local Jewish Heritage Month award in June, was asked last week if she had concerns about Waiters’ comments, she said she was unfamiliar with the content of the comments – even though the comments were printed in a cover story about the school board race last month.
After the Reporter emailed her a copy of the transcript of the remarks, Danzker said she had no comment because they “have nothing to do with the Board of Education.”
However, Murray said he had discussed the comments with Danzker.
“We got the sense of where Pat’s true heart lies,” said Murray, “and sometimes her statements aren’t 100 percent reflective of her approach.”
He added, “I tend to believe that the whole of her statement can tend to be lost in a few sentences.”
Carlo Davis may be reached at cdavis@hudsonreporter.com.