Three Board of Education Seats Up for Grabs Tuesday

When the dust settles Tuesday night, the Englewood Board of Education will have at least one new member and could have as many as three.

Six candidates — who have aligned themselves in competing camps — are vying for three seats on the board.

Incumbents Stephen Brown and Glenn Garrison, and newcomer Amy Ginsberg, an associate dean at a Brookyln college, would like to see the district remain on its current path.

"We have a very good board right now," Garrison, a New York hospital administrator, told NorthJersey.com last month. "We want to keep that momentum going."

As a sign of the district's progress, Garrison cited Dwight Morrow's SAT scores, which rank higher than 93 percent of the school's 30 state-designated peers, according to the recently released New Jersey School Performance Reports.

"We have higher SAT scores than Teaneck, than Hackensack, than Elmwood Park, than Ridgefield Park," he said at last week's candidates debate. "We are doing some things right. Our kids are getting into Ivy League schools. Not all of them, but they are now. They didn’t do that when I got on the board."

Challengers Devry Pazant, Junius "Jeff" Carter III and Carol Feinstein, the former president of the Englewood Teachers Association want to take the board in a different direction. 

The slate of challengers have called the board's treatment of residents "disrespectful" and "condescending" and have criticized many of its spending and personnel decisions, including the outsourcing of secretaries and classroom assistants to a private staffing firm in 2012, and the decision to pay the superintendent above the state-mandated cap while cutting or watering down academic programs.

“I think we’ve spent in wrong areas,” Carter, an employee of the Bergen County Special Services School District, said last week at the candidates debate. “We’re overpaying our superintendent and if we look at bringing some of those other costs in then we would have the funds to be able to put in the programs that are necessary.”

Polls open Tuesday at 7 a.m and close at 9 p.m. Click here for a complete list of polling places by ward and district.

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