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 Education for all Children slate. To read past stories, see hudsonreporter.com. Watch for a wrap-up next week.
At its most simplified, the campaign of Frances Rhodes-Kearns and Peter Biancamano for re-election to the Board of Education this November is about balance. Rhodes-Kearns and Biancamano are two of the three incumbents running this year, having been elected together along with current state Assemblyman Carmelo Garcia in 2011. They are also the two current members of the nine-seat school board who were not elected with or appointed by the Kids First slate, which is backed by Mayor Dawn Zimmer. They often criticize board majority actions, and especially oppose the majority’s attempt to block a local charter school from expanding.
The decision of Rhodes-Kearns and Biancamano to run together on the Education for All Children slate makes clear that they intend to continue their role as opposition voices.
“If I have learned anything in my years on the board, it’s that no party who has a simple majority should ever have complete control,” said Rhodes-Kearns at an Oct. 8 forum.
“Who am I to tell others what we should do with their money?” – Peter Biancamano
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Biancamano was born and raised in Hoboken, where his parents run the M&P Biancamano deli on Washington Street. He currently works at NBC Universal in New York. Last fall, he ran unsuccessfully for an at-large seat on the City Council on the ticket of 4th Ward Councilman Tim Occhipinti, who was a candidate for mayor.
Rhodes Kearns is seeking her fifth term on the school board. She was first elected in 2002. Rhodes-Kearns also had one previous unsuccessful run for City Council in 2009. Rhodes-Kearns currently works for Hudson County Schools of Technology, which runs Hudson County’s public magnet high schools High Tech and County Prep.
With 16 combined years of experience on the school board, a significant portion of it spent in the minority, Biancamano and Rhodes-Kearns are realistic about what they can achieve, especially given the fact that the six-member Kids First majority on the school board is not under threat in this election.
“I know that one of the other slates out there have all these great ideas,” said Biancamano, “but they’re going to realize that…they’re going to need other board members’ support.”
“It’s all about communication,” he continued. “I try not to be negative about my colleagues because at the end of the day, we all believe in one thing, and that’s making the education of our students better…you need to work together with whoever is up there.” He cited a reduction in legal fees as an area where he had worked with Kids First.
Administrators
The Education for all Children slate argues that many of the problems it sees with Hoboken schools are the result of a lack of stability and continuity in the district’s administrative and teacher personnel. Under the Kids First majorities, wrote Rhodes-Kearns in an email, “We have seen nine School Business Administrators, Two Superintendents/ Two Interim Superintendents/ One Acting Superintendent since 2009.”
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. By comparison, Hoboken’s last permanent superintendent, Dr. Mark Toback, stayed for three and a half years. But other administrators did not last as long.
“It is no secret that the behavior of Kids First was the deciding factor that led many of our seasoned professionals to leave,” added Rhodes-Kearns. “This kind of micro-management needs to stop.”
When asked for specific examples of this micro-management, Biancamano cited Kids First members “consistently being in our schools, consistently calling the superintendent, …consistently calling our lawyers for C.Y.A. purposes.”
Biancamano said the role of school board members is meant to be much more supervisory. “Unfortunately, a lot of my colleagues think they run the schools,” he continued.
One antidote to the revolving door suggested by Biancamano and Rhodes-Kearns is promoting from within rather than hiring from outside. The current board’s predilection with hiring outsiders has produced low morale about teachers, according to Biancamano.
When the school board considered candidates for interim superintendent this summer after Toback announced his resignation, Biancamano and Rhodes-Kearns nominated Assistant Superintendent Dr. Miguel Hernandez. The board majority did not bite, and instead selected Dr. Richard Brockel, most recently the superintendent of Greenwood Lake, N.Y.
“Dr. Toback brought [Hernandez] in,” said Biancamano. “Dr. Toback had said to us how great he was as assistant superintendent, and then all of a sudden…they go outside again.”
The last permanent superintendent before Toback, Jack Raslowsky, had been a Hoboken school board member prior to his selection and resigned from the board in order to be considered. After two years as superintendent, he too left to become the president of Xavier High School in Manhattan.
Biancamano said Raslowsky was not a good example of internal promotion because he was not a district administrator, and was a school board member. Raslowsky also had previous experience as the principal of St. Peter’s Preparatory School in Jersey City.
Biancamano said promoting Hernandez would have saved the district money, because his replacement as assistant superintendent would have been paid less money. Instead, the board hired Brockel at a per diem rate of $605 per day and gave Hernandez a $4,000 raise, bringing their total combined salary to roughly $310,000. The district isn’t paying Brockel health benefits, but he already receives a yearly pension of $112,623 from the state of New Jersey for his past service in public schools, according to DataUniverse records.
Voting on the school budget
The Education for all Children slate is also strongly in favor of returning to a system of mandatory annual city-wide referendums on the school budget. Due to changes made by the school board in February 2012, the annual school budget only has to be approved by referendum if the tax levy increases by more than two percent.
“Unfortunately, the Kids First majority voted to take that right away from the public,” said Rhodes-Kearns. The election reform passed by a vote of 5-4 with Biancamano and Rhodes-Kearns in opposition.
Biancamano said he voted against the last two school budgets precisely because they increased taxes without going to a public referendum. “Who am I to tell others what we should do with their money,” he asked, “especially when before the last three years, they had a right to vote on what to do with their money?”
School budget referendums, said Biancamano, were an issue of fairness, particularly for those taxpayers who have no children in the public schools.
Where to make cuts
When it comes to the $65 million budget, Biancamano says there is definitely still room to trim, especially in the realm of non-educational spending.
“If you take out the early childhood enrollment and funding and you take out the charter enrollment and funding, the budget goes down to about $48 million for only 1,700 K-12 students,” he said. He highlighted consultants, legal fees, and the food service debt as areas where the district still spends too much.
Including judgments, the district’s legal costs have fallen from $574,143 in 2011 to a projected $210,000 this year. “We’re still not where we should be in terms of legal fees,” said Biancamano, though he added that he was “proud of how much lower they’ve gotten since I’ve been on the board.”
A 2011 audit found that Hoboken public schools owed around $700,000 to its then-food service provider Chartwells, partially due to the failure to collect around $130,000 in food bills from parents in the 2010-11 school year.
Biancamano says he was a major advocate for finding a new food service provider. “I said we have to stop increasing this debt because it’s only going to hurt us in the long run,” he explained. The school board did select a new food provider, Sodexo, and has been slowly paying down the remaining Chartwells debt, of which only $150,000 remains, according to Biancamano. Under its current contract, Sodexo agrees to reimburse the district for any annual deficit up to almost $129,000.
For the spending that does go directly to education, Biancamano said stagnant and falling enrollment in the upper grades is preventing the district from getting bang for their buck, because the same sized schools educate less and less children.
“We have all of these wonderful teachers and students in the early childhood program,” he said. “There’s 750 students in there, and we barely have 500 from grades 9 through 12.”
“If the enrollment is going down,” he continued, “which is my fear in the high school, then we’re going to continue to have budget constraints in the future.”
Improving the high school
As one way to help boost enrollment, Biancamano said the school board should look into adding a dual language program to the high school in order to capitalize on the success of the Hoboken Dual Language Charter School (HoLa). “HoLa parents that I speak to tell me ‘if you had a dual language program in that high school, I would more than happy to send my son or daughter there,’ ” he said.
In 2009, Rhodes-Kearns voted in favor of creating a Spanish-English dual language program for kindergarteners and first graders within the traditional school district. After the program was rejected by the school board majority, its organizers applied for state approval to become a charter school and opened their doors as HoLa in 2010.