School Advisory Board Candidates Meet for Forum

Five of the six candidates seeking seats on the Newark School Advisory Board met Thursday at Essex County College for a forum to discuss issues ranging from charter schools to the performance of state-appointed superintendent Cami Anderson.

Three seats are up for election April 16.

The forum, hosted by the Newark Trust for Education, was moderated by Richard Cammarieri of the New Community Corp., who read a series of questions to the candidates. The candidates did not debate each other but did offer sometimes divergent views on a number of issues.

In attendance were Khalil Rashidi, Rashon Hasan, Sheila Montague, a teacher with the Newark Public Schools, and Gerell Elliot. A sixth candidate, Philip Seelinger, did not attend while another candidate, Ariagna Perello, left midway through to attend a meeting on the school budget being held at the same time at Central High School.

Perello, a Central Ward business owner, Rashidi, who works at the University of Medicine and Dentistry, and Hasan, a manager with Verizon Telecom who holds an MBA, are running on the same slate,  the Children First Team, and their responses to Thursday’s questions were broadly similar.

The school system in Newark, along with Paterson, Jersey City and, as of a few days ago, Camden, is run largely by Trenton, unlike nearly every other school district, where the elected school board decides on virtually every aspect of district management, including the budget and the hiring of the superintendent. The Newark advisory board is currently asking the courts to restore local control based on state assessments showing the district achieving “passing” grades in four out of five aspects of school district management.

All the candidates expressed support for a return to local control.

“The [school district] has been under state control for over a decade. The city did a bad job, the state is doing a worse job,yet they’re still in power,” said Elliot, a Newark firefighter. “This is just another scheme to privatize.”

The candidates were also in agreement on the performance of Anderson, the superintendent, giving her a “failing grade” for not communicating her policies to the community and for refusing to provide data on the effectiveness of various programs. All the candidates likewise agreed that the district’s special education program needs significant improvement. The candidates were also in accord over the question of merit pay for teachers, which became part of a historic contract signed last year.

Rashidi noted that merit pay requires assessments of diverse staff, such as gym teachers and guidance counselors, whose jobs are so dissimilar that comparing the performance among them is extraordinarily difficult. Montague said such assessments were bound to be “subjective,” while Hason said merit pay systems “just open the door to unethical behavior”.

The candidates’ views on the controversial topic of charter schools, however, diverged significantly. The three members of the Children First slate all expressed qualified support for such schools, which sometimes share buildings with traditional public schools.

“The Children First Team supports quality education for the children whether they attend charter schools or public schools,” said Hasan.

“We should stop the street fighting between the charter schools and the public schools,” said Perello.

Elliot, however, argued that having two different types of education environment under one roof engenders envy among students and that all the schools should be administered uniformly. Montague, too, was skeptical of the charter school experiment.

“I do believe in choice, because we had choice before charter schools came to fruition and we’ll have choice after they’re gone,” she said, adding that there should be “unilateral” operational guidelines among all schools. Charter schools in Newark have more flexibility with regards to some operating guidelines than traditional public schools.

To view the entire forum, click here .