BOE Candidate Helene Barsamian Interested in More Private Funding

Board of Education candidate Helene Barsamian knows six languages.

While that sounds impressive–and, it is–it's something the Morris Township resident learned out of necessity and environment as a child in Romania.

Five of those languages–French, German, Romanian, Italian, Armenian–came from growing up in a multi-cultural household and by living in close geographical proximity to Italy. English came by the time she was nine-years-old.

And children in the , Barsamian said, can aspire to similar feats. "I would like to see language instruction started earlier than it does now," she said. "If you start a child in Kindergarten or even earlier, it gets easier. It's just speaking and hearing. They don't have to thnik of past tense, future tense. It's practice and intensive immersion, and I think we would in a way bypass later on the challenges with testing."

Barsamian also said she feels the way tests are currently worded is not beneficial to the students. "Even English speaking children do have problems understanding sometimes how the tests are set up," she said. "We need to review how we raise the questions on these tests."

Barsamian has been an area resident for almost 40 years. However, when her children were of school age, she and her husband opted to have their kids educated in the private realm, at and, later, The Pingry School in Short Hills. 

"The education presented at the time, I felt that it lacked," she said of what she saw in the early-to-mid 1980s. "There were certain issues at the time with bussing, moving children around, I was not ready to have that happen."

Coming from European background, Barsamian said children there in public schools had more educational choices available to them than in American public schools, something she said she wanted her children to have available.

"The more I read about where the American children are compared to the rest of the world's children, reading placement, math, so on, I find that appalling," she said. "We need to revise what we really ask for from this new group of future leaders. Not all of them need to be college educated, but they should have a basic strong education so they are prepared."

As a professional university fundraiser for over 20 years, Barsamian said she wanted to see additional private funding pushes from the Morris School District, to help defer costs. "Despite tution costs going up, public/private partnerships have helped tremendously and increased offerings at universities. I'm hoping we can do the same thing.

"It's your children, your people," she said.