Parents, Students Angered by Interim Superintendent Missing BOE Meeting

A group of about 50 parents, teachers, students and community members were disappointed Tuesday, when they attended the ’s regular business meeting hoping to address Interim Superintendent Steven Engravalle directly, only to find that he was not in attendance for a second consecutive board meeting.

“He’s dealing with a seriously grave medical issue of a family member,” said school board president Arthur Levine when asked by a student why Engravalle wasn’t at the library for the meeting. “That’s all I can say at this point. I told him not to come; it’s serious.”

Earlier in the meeting, after a security audit presentation, PTA president Ada Garcia brought up an issue she said has been circulating in the community “for the past six months.”

“Our interim superintendent has been saying to parents that he has a nuclear bomb that would bring this town to its knees,” Garcia said. “He has said it to several parents, and we just want to know what that is because it’s become quite a scare for all of us.”

Levine said the board had not heard about it, but that they would look into it right away.

“This board has not heard him or anyone else say such a thing,” Levine said. “We’re going to be investigating the complaints. I’m going to speak to Ms. [Paula] Colbath. She will give me her information, and we will seriously look at it. That’s all we can do because this is the first time publically we’re hearing about the matter.”

Colbath, a Fort Lee parent, later explained that the “nuclear bomb” comment was somewhat of an exaggeration, and that it “suggested that it meant that Mr. Engravalle was in some garage mixing something up.”

“That’s not what the import of the comment was,” Colbath said. “The import of the comment was that he had information that could bring Fort Lee to its knees, and it was reported to me that those were the words he used the second time, that he had a ‘nuclear bomb’ that could bring us to our knees.”

Colbath continued that she’s heard the rumor from several people in the community, and that it’s been “floating around” since about January.

“This is not new news, and I suspect that board members have heard it privately from people,” Colbath said. “But this is the first meeting where it’s been raised publically.”

Board vice president Linda McCue said it was the first time the issue had been brought to the board.

“We just can’t now make a comment about it because that’s not fair to either side,” McCue said. “I’m not going to pick a side, and say one’s telling the truth and one’s not. So you brought it up publically; we heard it, and the president said he will deal with it. There’s nothing we can do right now.”

Meanwhile, several other people—mostly students and their parents—were at the meeting Tuesday to press Engravalle for answers on the non-renewal of the contracts of two teachers in what amounted to a reprise of the , when dozens of parents and students spoke out in staunch support of seventh grade Language Arts teacher Christina Martelo and seventh grade Science teacher Ian Zellman.

Eighth-grader Gabriella Higgins said, “Last year, I had the pleasure of having both Mr. Zellman and Mrs. Martelo as my teachers, and I can honestly say that they’re the two best teachers I’ve ever had.”

Seventh-grader Anselm Kizza-Besigye, who spoke so eloquently about the two teachers on May 7, had harsh words for Engravalle at Tuesday’s meeting, even after Levine explained his reason for not being there.

“I was under the impression that Mr. Engravalle would be here to hear what we had to say,” Anselm said. “As you can tell, there aren’t as many students as were here last time, but the people that are here came with the [belief] that they would be able to see Mr. Engravalle and speak about the outrage that everybody has been under for almost a month.”

He said he personally felt “greatly disrespected.”

“As long as their contract renewal is in jeopardy, we will continue; we will persist to come to these meetings,” the seventh-grader said.

Fort Lee parent and soon-to-be BOE candidate David Sarnoff referred to a that he missed the May 7 meeting because he was at what he described as a “very important” meeting with K12 in the Washington, D.C. area that had been planned for a long time, but that he was proud of the Fort Lee students who spoke out at the school board meeting in support of their teachers.

“To his credit, Mr. Engravalle said that he was very proud that the students had the courage to come out, and that he would find a way to allow them to have his ear,” Sarnoff said Tuesday, going on to suggest “some kind of forum that the superintendent can have so the middle school students and their parents could come, en masse, and actually be heard by him in person.”

“The school year is coming to an end very shortly,” Sarnoff said. “I think before the end of the school year … I would request that the board request that type of forum in an auditorium or somewhere where these students and parents can really be heard.”

Patch will have more on Tuesday's school board meeting.

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