BOE Member: More Focus on Education, Curriculum in 2nd Term

After three years of hopping from one fiscal crisis to the next, Moorestown Board of Education member Dave Weinstein hopes he can spend part of his second term drilling down into matters that have less to do with dollars and cents and more to do with educating kids.

A little more than 24 hours removed from being sworn in for a second term on the board—at tonight’s reorganization meeting at William Allen Middle School—Weinstein ticked off the fiscal issues he and his colleagues have faced over the last few years: the failed budget of 2010, deep cuts to state aid and near endless contract negotiations with the union, to name a few.

“I have not had a single minute where there has not been a large financial issue facing the board,” he said. “The past six months have been the quietest time we’ve ever had.”

Weinstein is optimistic the district can continue that trend into 2013, but acknowledged that “as a country and as a school district, we’re not out of the fiscal crisis yet.”

Still, the public finance attorney, who has a third and a fifth grader in the school district, stressed that he’d like to spend more time focusing on things like curriculum going forward, mentioning improvements to the district’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) programs specifically.

After years volunteering at the township level—e.g. as a member of the Budget Efficiency Task Force and the Economic Development Advisory Committee—Weinstein said he ran for a seat on the board a few years back because, since the schools take the biggest chunk of taxpayer dollars, he saw it as an opportunity to provide the most impactful public service.

“The schools are probably the most important thing in town,” he said. “I was looking at it from the perspective of, I grew up in this town, I want to give back.”

Looking ahead, Weinstein said the implementation of the new state-sanctioned teacher evaluations will be one of the district’s major challenges this year—“That’ll impact how our staff is reviewed, and it will impact their livelihood directly”—as well as improving its aging infrastructure.

“I haven’t had a chance to focus on anything other than the budget and finances,” he said. “I want to make our district the standard-bearer for education, not just in the county, but in the country and the state … We’re very good at what we do, but we’re not the best.”

The board will hold its reorganization meeting at 7:30 tonight in the library at the middle school.