Brick School Board Meeting To Fill Talty's Seat

The Brick Township Board of Education has scheduled a special meeting Monday to interview candidates for the seat that became open when John Talty resigned his seat in April due to health issues.

The meeting is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. at the board office on Hendrickson Boulevard. Interviews will be held in open session, board attorney Jack Sahradnik said Friday.

Nine people have applied to fill the seat on a temporary basis, and a special election will be held to decide who will finish out the term, which ends in 2016.

The interviews follow a contentious discussion at the school board meeting on May 28. Talty had resigned his seat in late April after undergoing open heart surgery, Board President Sharon Cantillo announced at the April 30 meeting.

But last week Talty sought to rescind his resignation, because of a number of issues facing the board, including the investigation of suspended Superintendent Walter Uszenski and the proposal to cut 31 full-time bus driver positions from the district’s transportation department.

The board voted last week to delay for two weeks any action on sending the layoff plan to the state Civil Service Commission, and the Transportation Workers Union, which represent the drivers as well as a number of other district employees, said they plan to be at the meeting Monday because there has been no discussion with the union with regard to that situation.

“They said two weeks,” Greg Cohen, the district’s TWU representative, said late Thursday. “They should be discussing this, too.”

The May 28 meeting lasted six hours as the board dealt with not only Talty’s request, but extensive comments from the bus drivers about the layoff plan, as well as Uszenski’s suspension. The board voted unanimously to delay an action on the plan -- which was to have been submitted to the civil service commission on May 29 -- for two weeks, to allow the board to look into some of the information presented by the drivers.

Talty, who served on the school board from 2004-07, was elected to the board again in 2010, and won re-election in November 2013 with Karyn Cusanelli. In the 2013 election he received 5,813 votes -- 735 more than his closest challenger, David Fischer.

Cantillo, in asking the board to allow Talty to rescind his resignation, urged the board to consider that election victory because, she said, it represented the will of the voters.

“I don’t believe Mr. Talty should have to run again in November for his seat,” she said.

But board members Michael Conti, Frank Pannucci Jr. and John Barton -- who was fourth in the 2013 voting but won election to the board last fall, edging incumbent Larry Reid -- said to allow Talty to rescind his resignation would be unfair to those who already had applied to fill the board vacancy. Conti and Pannucci expressed concerns that reappointing Talty would open the school board up to legal challenges, especially since the window to apply was ending June 1.

In the end, the motion to reappoint Talty failed in a tie vote, with Conti, Pannucci and Barton voting against the motion and Cantillo, Cusanelli and Susan Suter voting in favor.