Five of the eight candidates running for the Hoboken Board of Education this fall appeared at a forum this past Wednesday to debate how best to address charter school expansion, budget challenges, and low student achievement.
Two full slates of candidates were in attendance at the event, which was organized by the Hoboken Quality of Life Coalition (HQLC) and the Elks. Three seats on the school board will be contested in the general election on Wednesday Nov. 4.
Both of the slates present on Wednesday, Parents for Change and Education for all Children, have been sharply critical of the Kids First majority that currently controls the board and enjoys the support of Mayor Dawn Zimmer. And the third slate, Parents for Progress, who are considered by many to be allied with Kids First, sent no representatives due to what they said were scheduling conflicts.
With only Kids First opponents present, the debate was rife with criticism but otherwise uncontentious.
Optimum Channel 78 will run a video of the proceedings in the next two weeks.
Unable to attend
Monica Stromwall, a member of Parents for Progress and one of the incumbent candidates, said everyone on her slate had “previously scheduled trips and business matters” that prevented their attendance on Wednesday.
In emails provided to the Hoboken Reporter, Stromwall said that the HQLC had not given Parents for Progress adequate advance notice of the forum’s date.
“I’ve run a business for 14 years and I know how to manage a budget.”—Lynn Danzker.
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Stromwall was informed of the new date on Sept. 24, but she said two weeks was “not an adequate amount of time to give notice.”
Stromwall contended that the Coalition should have provided the scheduled date of the forum to her slate “when the newspaper published our names in the summer.” The Hoboken Reporter first mentioned the candidates for the 2014 school board race on Aug. 17.
HQLC President Helen Manogue has been organizing forums for Hoboken school board, City Council and mayoral races for the past six years. She said this was the first time an electoral slate had failed to send any representatives.
Stromwall said she had to attend a meeting of the school board curriculum committee. Manogue requested via email that Stromwall at least come to the forum when her meeting was complete and give a statement to those in attendance.
Reining in the budget
One of the key questions faced by the Hoboken school board is how to manage a $65 million budget and deal with stagnant state aid, a chronic food service deficit, growing special education and energy costs, standard increases in salary and benefits for employees, and the expansion of public charter schools.
Brian Murray and Lynn Danzker from the Parents for Change slate – who are often critical of the board majority — argued that the school board’s recent lawsuit against the expansion of the Hoboken Dual Language Charter School focused attention on the wrong things.
In fact, the board majority’s stance against charter school expansion has been a big school issue this year.
Murray and Danzker said the board keeps citing the cost of charter school expansion—a projected $773,224 for the current school year—and not on the 50 percent of the overall budget that is not spent directly in the classroom. Using two one dollar bills to represent the Hoboken school budget, Murray argued that the Board of Ed should be focusing on the dollar bill that goes to overhead instead of the penny that goes to charter schools.
“I’ve run a business for 14 years and I know how to manage a budget,” said Danzker.
Murray’s third running mate, Patricia Waiters, said she would aid the Hoboken public school budget through advocacy with the state government in Trenton.
Peter Biancamano and Frances Rhodes-Kearns, both incumbent candidates (and not members of the Kids First majority), have teamed up to form the Education for all Children slate. Biancamano said he has worked with his fellow trustees, including Kids First members, to develop a plan to eliminate the food service debt. He also cited a decrease in the amount of money that goes to legal fees as one of his accomplishments. Biancamano said legal fees were 153 percent above the state average when he entered the school board.
Still, Biancamano said that he had voted against the last two school budgets because they raised taxes without being approved by referendum.
“We just had a property revaluation,” said Biancamano. “I’m a property owner, my parents own many properties in town, and the last thing I want to do is raise taxes more money with the property revaluation out there.”
In 2012, the school board voted to end 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 2 percent, which has not occurred since.
All five candidates at the debate said they support bringing back a yearly referendum on school budgets.
Charters championed
All of the candidates present at the forum criticized the school board majority for hiring a lawyer to try to stop the HoLa charter school from expanding to seventh and eighth grades.
Biancamano and Rhodes-Kearns had voted against the contract for the lawyer retained by the school board in that case.
The third incumbent candidate, Stromwall (not present), voted in favor of the lawyer.
Danzker has a child in HoLa and has been active in fundraising for the school, and she argued forcefully that that the Board of Education’s lawsuit was the wrong way to address the purported issues it raised.
Members of the board majority this year said that the charter schools end up segregating the school system, and draw away too many financial resources.
However, the district has glaring differences in the racial makeup of its regular schools as well, as one elementary school downtown has a much lower percentage of white students than the others.
“If there is segregation,” Danzker said, “then call the Justice Department and let them address it as a civil rights issue. There’s no reason why one school should be suing another.”
But if re-elected, Rhodes-Kearns said she will petition the state government to change the way charter schools are funded. Currently, money for each child in a public charter school is subtracted from the budget of the school district he or she resides in, rather than being paid directly by the state.
Slamming the revolving door
Another key issue discussed at Wednesday’s Candidates’ Forum was the looming search for a new superintendent to replace interim Superintendent Richard Brockel. After former Superintendent Mark Toback announced in June that he was leaving to become the superintendent for Wayne Township, the Board hired Brockel to serve until a permanent replacement could be found.
The sequence is a near repeat of what happened five years ago when then-Superintendent Jack Raslowsky resigned to become the president of Xavier High School in Manhattan. Peter Carter was brought in as an interim Superintendent, and Toback was hired to replace him after a two-year process in 2011.
All the candidates present on Wednesday agreed that the revolving door of superintendents, business administrators, and curriculum directors was a key element hampering the district’s ability to move forward and improve schools.
Rhodes-Kearns argued that finding a superintendent that will actually stay long-term will require addressing the reputation of Hoboken’s school board.
“The word is out to people who are looking for jobs as superintendent,” she said. “They don’t want to apply to Hoboken because of the micromanagement that’s been going on.”
Some of the candidates said that the board had erred in not promoting from within when picking an interim Superintendent this year. Biancamano and Rhodes-Kearns nominated Assistant Superintendent Miguel Hernandez to fill the role, but the suggestion did not find favor with the Kids First majority.
“It seems kind of funny,” said Waiters, “because every time right before an election we get a new superintendent that don’t have a clue what’s going on in our schools and is only counting his paycheck.”
When asked, none of the candidates could name specific changes to the curriculum that would improve the quality of education in Hoboken.
However, there was a general agreement among the candidates present that the curriculum could be improved, and that any deficiencies in it were the result of Hoboken’s turnover in administrative leadership positions in recent years.