Long Beach Parent Runs for School Board

Story by Jeff Lipton

Long Beach parent Matthew Adler said he realizes the important role the public schools play in helping the community to recover from October’s devastating storm.

He is trying to convince families to stay in town and strongly believes the Long Beach School District can be a main selling point.

“I believe in this community,” Adler said. “I love this community and I don’t want to see people leave Long Beach. I want to be a positive change so people would want to move here.”

Adler, a 38-year-old math teacher at Seaford High School, recently announced his candidacy in this year’s school board elections and said he will submit enough petitions to get on the ballot before the May 1 deadline. One seat, that of President Roy Lester, is up for election.

Adler said he is running because he wants “to provide a quality education to the community.”

If elected, one of his top priorities would be to improve teacher training.

“We need to give teachers the proper training so they know how to implement exciting lessons and not just to teach to the test,” said Adler, whose son attends the first grade at East Elementary and whose daughter would be enrolled at Blackheath Pre-k. “We have some wonderful teachers in this district and I want to give them the proper training to succeed so they could prepare our students for the future.”

His other goal is to streamline administrative costs, which would save money for the district and the taxpayers. He said Long Beach schools still use paper report cards and could issue them electronic reports instead.

“This is wasting money,” he said. “There are ways to be more effective and efficient.” Another priority for Adler would be to increase transparency and accountability on the school board and throughout the entire school district. He would hope to accomplish this by creating more community outreach programs.

“People don’t know what the job descriptions are of some of our administrators,” said Adler, a Long Beach resident since 2002 who’s running for his first elected post. “When people go to board meetings, they don’t understand the jargon. When they hear from the director of facilities, what does that title mean? What are the responsibilities? I want to hold these meetings so that they understand how the school system works.

“Being an educator, I’m able to facilitate useful and sometimes confusing information and to explain it to them.”

He said he would also open the lines of communication with parents so that they don’t feel disenfranchised and that their opinions really count when they are selected to sit on a committee in the district.

“We have to value their opinions,” Adler said. “This is a diverse community. We have to be open-minded and see things from a different perspective sometimes.”

He said one advantage he holds is that he’s a parent of two young children and he has a huge stake in what happens in the district. He said there’s room for the district to improve students’ academic achievement. He added that he will be interested to see if the district restores any of the cuts it made in the proposed $123 million budget.

Adler said the school board would have to make “hard decisions” due to the number of residents who may not return because of the hurricane. Enrollment and tax base could both be casualties of the storm.

He said he is not running because the school board is failing the students.

“In fact, in the wake of the hurricane, they have stepped up and done a phenomenal job,” he said. “It was not an easy situation.”

The school board election is May 21.