2 New Faces Lead In Brick School Board Election Race

BRICK, NJ — The Brick Township Board of Education will likely have two new members after Melissa Parker and Michael Blandina were leading in the unofficial results of the 2020 school board election.

Parker had 11,111 votes and Blandina had 10,512 votes according to the unofficial tallies posted by the Ocean County Board of Elections, which said 57 of 57 districts were reporting.

Jessica Clayton, the lone incumbent, trails Blandina by about 130 votes, with 10,380 votes.

Micah Bender was 589 votes behind Blandina with 9,923, votes and Melissa Lozada had 8,087 in the unofficial tallies.

School board seats are three years and are unpaid positions.

The vote totals could yet change as election officials have to count mail-in ballots that are received by 8 p.m on Nov. 10; provisional ballots cast by voters who went to polling locations on Tuesday will be counted once they confirm mail-in votes. It's unclear how many ballots remain outstanding out of Brick's 57,124 registered voters.

Ocean County Clerk Scott A. Colabella said the county still has little over 49,000 ballots to count as of Wednesday, a number that does not include mail-in ballots that were postmarked Nov. 3 and received at the Board of Elections no later than 8 p.m. on Nov. 10.

The Asbury Park Press reported 302,646 ballots had been returned to the Board of Elections as of 8:30 a.m. Tuesday. Of those, 273,100 ballots had been counted as of early Wednesday, meaning nearly 30,000 remained uncounted. There were 430,560 ballots mailed to eligible voters in Ocean County, the report said.

Parker, who ran with Bender under the Transparency and Community slogan, serves on the PTA at the local, county and national level.

Blandina, a 1982 Brick Township High School graduate, has a long history of community volunteerism, including heading up the Ocean County Columbus Day Parade committee.

Clayton is a certified early childhood educator and has advocated for social and emotional learning to be infused in the curriculum during her time on the board.

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The biggest issue facing the district is the ongoing cuts to state funding under S2. The law passed in 2018 mandates aid cuts for school districts that are deemed to be receiving too much aid and, not paying their fair share of property taxes, under a formula that the state Department of Education continues to refuse to release. Brick is one of several districts that have sued the education department seeking release of that formula.

S2 also requires districts that are under adequacy — meaning they are not spending what the state says is the minimum per pupil for a "thorough and efficient" education.

Blandina said he wants to look for alternative sources of funding to fill in some of the gaps while the district continues to fight for adequate funding. "I will work with anybody to help us get a fairer share of state aid, that Brick Township deserves," he said.

Parker said she intends to keep fighting to see that the S2 formula is released, and to make sure legislators know it has resulted in" devastating funding cuts and what the effects are on not only our students but our community as well."

The pandemic will continue to have far-reaching effects, including on the budget process for the 2021-22 school year — a budget that the board will be looking at closely both before and after the election winners are sworn into their seats in January.

For full coverage of the 2020 election in New Jersey, go here: New Jersey Elections 2020

This article has been updated to include information on how many ballots remain to be counted in Ocean County.

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