Twelve candidates are vying for the three available seats in this year’s Board of Education election in North Bergen. The election will be held April 21.
The board has nine members in total, each serving a three-year term. Every year, three of those terms expire. This year the terms are ending for board member Ruth Shaw, Maurena Luzzi, and Board of Education President Julio Marenco.
Luzzi is retiring from elected office and Marenco is not seeking re-election as he is running for a seat on the Township Commission on the ticket with Mayor Nicholas Sacco.
Shaw is running for reelection to the school board along with newcomers Haissam “Sam” Jaafar and Claudia Rodriguez on the “Our Children First 2015” ticket, endorsed by Sacco.
Running against three incumbents backed by Mayor Sacco are nine challengers, including three candidates endorsed by the North Bergen Concerned Citizens Group.
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The other candidates for the Board of Education election are Fredy Chilito-Ramos, Fabiola Delgado, Juana Maria Dilone, Javier Hidalgo, Alejandro Mejia, and Daisy Nisch.
Polls in North Bergen will be open from 2 to 9 p.m. Poll locations can be found online at https://voter.njsvrs.com.
The ‘Our Children First 2015’ ticket
Ruth Shaw is a lifelong resident of North Bergen. She has served on the Board of Education for the past nine years and is running for her fourth term.
“I am running for re-election to make sure North Bergen students continue receiving an outstanding public education in our schools,” said Shaw. “Our teachers and administrators do an incredible job of providing our children with the tools necessary to succeed, and my goal as a board member is to continue supporting their efforts.”
Shaw, 59, is a clerk/typist at the North Bergen MUA and an active member of the North Bergen Democratic Municipal Committee. She has two grown children who graduated from North Bergen High School.
“As a former PTA member, I believe that parental involvement in crucial to education,” she said. “I will continue working with Superintendent [Dr. George] Solter and our administrative team to encourage even more parental participation.”
She is married to John Shaw, superintendent of the North Bergen Department of Public Works.
Haissam “Sam” Jaafar, 39, has been a North Bergen resident for over 15 years and he and his wife have three young children, two of whom attend Robert Fulton School with the other in pre-K.
Jaafar is a supply chain manager at a major engineering firm and a member of the North Bergen Rent Control Board.
“I am running for the Board of Education for two reasons,” said Jaafar. “To give back to the North Bergen community that has become my family’s home, and to use my expertise in management and business to make sure the district continues to use taxpayers’ funds wisely. Our district is the most underfunded by state aid in New Jersey and that means we have to make sure our operations are as efficient as possible to both deliver the best education we have and also protect taxpayers.”
Jaafar wants to see the district continue to integrate new technologies and aims to advocate for this as a board member. “We need to keep working hard to make sure all of our children have the necessary equipment to learn and thrive,” he said.
Claudia Rodriguez, the third candidate on the Our Children First 2015 ticket, has lived in North Bergen for more than 20 years. She is a legislative aide in the Office of Senator Sacco.
A member of the library board, she has “years of experience serving the community through Senator Sacco’s office, providing constituent services such as welfare, food stamps, and assisting with other governmental agencies.”
Rodgriguez, 60, is married with two children and four granddaughters. Her children graduated from North Bergen High School and one granddaughter is in pre-K in the township.
“I want to serve on the Board of Education for my granddaughters and all North Bergen children,” she said. “To make sure that our school system continues to deliver the excellent public education they all deserve.”
Her goal is “to work with the other board members to continue creating great new educational programs for our kids like the STEM Academy at North Bergen High School that opened recently. We must always strive to stay on the cutting edge and make sure our kids have access to the programs and classes they need.”
“Our children come first.”
The Save Our School (S.O.S) slate
In a written statement released on Wednesday, April 8, Larry Wainstein endorsed the three candidates on the Save Our School Slate. An accompanying press release stated that “our North Bergen school system is in a current state of decay, and getting worse by the year.”
Jose Canonico is among the three candidates running on the S.O.S. slate. A Cuban immigrant who came to Hudson County when he was two years old and moved to North Bergen in fourth grade, he graduated from North Bergen schools before majoring in business administration at Temple University.
His professional experience includes positions in technology at Cablevision, Bergen Logistics, and Jet Distribution. He now owns his own business, which includes consulting, designing, and installing Microsoft Client Server Systems, as well as Remote Access Surveillance.
Canonico, 49, said it is his goal “to give back to my community and school district, which set the foundation for my pursuit of higher education and helped develop my entrepreneurial spirit.”
If elected, he said he will aim to remove politics from the school system and “hire the best teachers regardless of where they live. I would search for some with experience outside of education before becoming teachers.”
Mary Luz Munoz came to the United States from Columbia in 1992. She is a graduate of High Tech High School and a single mother of a 13-year-old boy who is currently in seventh grade at Horace Mann School.
A former medical assistant at Englewood Hospital for three years, Munoz, 40, also worked at the Hudson Milestone Child Development Center caring for children with special needs.
“Our school system is plagued by political patronage,” she said in a statement. “While other towns have built new schools, North Bergen has not seen a new school built in over 50 years.”
“We need to build another high school, like an annex,” she said earlier this week. “The kids from Guttenberg are coming to North Bergen because they have no high school, so we have overpopulation.”
She is opposed to using trailers for classrooms and would like to institute additional afterschool programs so that parents don’t have to rush from work to pick up their kids.
Munoz is also concerned about security in the schools. “They should be in a place they feel comfortable and safe,” she said.
Jeanne Wesly was born in the Dominican Republic and immigrated to the United States in 1994. She has lived in North Bergen since 2009.
She is the mother of four young children and works in Union City as a fourth grade teacher of bilingual students.
Wesly, 39, met Wainstein at a community event over the summer. “I really, related to all his ideas and whatever he was looking for in North Bergen: changes, new blood,” she said. “He gave me the idea to run. He suggested that if we want something done we have to do it ourselves. Instead of complaining, get up and do something. And since I was involved in school I thought I was perfect for me. As a parent and teacher I want to help out with new ideas.”
Working as a teacher in Union City, she said, “I’ve seen firsthand what works there so I cannot help but to compare” the school systems between the two municipalities. She said that North Bergen lacks “simple stuff that I see Union City has and kids here don’t have. Like simple school supplies, copying paper. They don’t have a lot of books.”
As a working mother of toddlers she would also like to see day care programs for children in the downtown area.
Independent candidates
Several other candidates were also encouraged to run for the school board by Wainstein, although they are not on the SOS slate and were not official endorsed by the North Bergen Concerned Citizens Group.
Alejandro Mejia, 29, has lived in North Bergen for six years. After graduating from high school in West New York he attended Rutgers as an undergraduate.
“There was a class, ‘Business, Government, and Society,’” he said. “Basically it was about showing the correlation between the three of them and how everything is linked.”
While working on a paper for the class he researched the North Bergen school system and became intrigued. “I was introduced to the possibility of running [for the school board] by the Concerned Citizens Group,” he said. “And I thought it was a great idea to perhaps get a chance to make some positive changes in the school system in North Bergen.”
A former sales associate at a luxury clothing store, Mejia has specific ideas for how to improve the level of education. “I would do a few things, one of which would be making sure that teachers are not pressured into doing other activities other than concentrating on learning and teaching of the kids. That’s number one. Teachers should be teaching, concentrating all of their energy in trying to make kids better. They’re the foundation for a good society.”
He is also concerned about the conditions of the school. “There have been instances where they found bugs in the cafeteria,” he said. “The temperatures are too hot in the cafeteria and other spots don’t have the correct temperature.”
Daisy Nisch was also encouraged to run for the board by Wainstein. A teacher at a daycare in Union City for nine years, she has lived in North Bergen since 1991.
“Being in the education field I think I can contribute a lot of things,” she said. “Like how my job does things contrary to how North Bergen does them.”
Nisch, 38, is concerned about overcrowding at the high school. “There have been no new buildings for a very long time,” she said. “They need bigger schools to be able to have the amount of students they have.”
She would also like to see more types of programs added at different grade levels. “Home economics, shop, music, library, computers – in grammar school they have hardly anything,” she said. “In high school those are considered electives.”
“They need to offer things that’ll make the children competent enough to learn things and succeed in the future,” she stated.
The others
The other four candidates, Fredy Chilito-Ramos, Fabiola Delgado, Juana Maria Dilone, and Javier Hidalgo, did not respond to letters from the North Bergen Reporter and could not be reached by phone by press time.
Art Schwartz may be reached at arts@hudsonreporter.com.