Charters, Busing, Student Achievement Discussed at BOE Candidate Forum

From bridging an achievement gap and evaluating teachers to charter schools and courtesy busing, the nearly 100 people in attendance at Monday night’s Board of Education candidates’ forum heard from the five candidates seeking to win their vote come April 27.

The League of Women Voters of Teaneck and the Teaneck PTO Council hosted the forum at . Candidates included Patricia King-Butler, Howard Rose, Alan Sohn, Clara Williams and BOE President and incumbent Ardie Walser. 

After opening statements, moderator Barbara King presented questions from the audience. 

The first question asked about what training the Board would offer to staff to help bridge the achievement gap.

King-Butler said she would engage teachers in the summer and early fall with training “that involves pedagogy, differentiated learning – teaching children who might not learn in the same manner – and also classroom management – teaching character building and ethics,” she said. 

Rose touched on the idea of problem identification and training teachers to be sensitive to issues that affect students. 

Sohn said the Board could look at how the resources are allocated in the budget in order to have a direct impact on the achievement gap. He said in terms of administrators, skills need to be identified for what each administrator needs to have, needs to develop and needs to improve upon.

Walser said the district needs to become more outcome-based – changing programs in order to achive the desired results. He also said learning environments have to be identified to deal with any achievement gap. He suggested forming more connections between guidance counselors, teachers and parents. 

Williams said the current Board has been taking pro-active stances on closing the achievement gap.

“What they’ve tried to do and what I would continue to advocate for is reassessment of elementary math and literacy initiatives, which would build the children’s basic reading, writing and computation skills,” Williams said. 

She also said she would expand after-school support programs directed at struggling students.

The second question divided the candidates on who would be best to evaluate teachers.  Sohn, Walser and King-Butler felt that teachers’ peers, administrators, students and parents are all good sources of input for evaluating teachers.

Williams and Rose said that while input from students, parents and peers are important, the bulk of the evaluation should come from administrative staff.

On the topic of charter schools, all the candidates agreed that the funding of these schools is tough on the district's budget.

Williams said public schools and charter schools can be complimentary institutions, sharing on professional developments and best practices. Sohn continued with Williams’ thoughts on collaboration, saying that innovation should be embraced from whatever the source is, including charter schools.

Sohn did say the way charter schools are funded is irrational.

“The charter is granted, and we’re told to fund that,” he said. “I think if the commissioner of education had to come up with the funding for those charter schools we’d be a lot better off, rather than pitting public school parents against charter school parents, who are all public school parents.”

King-Butler noted that charter schools were designed to give students in poor neighborhoods a choice, especially if their public schools were insufficient.  She said she’s not opposed to charter schools, saying that she believes in innovative education and parental choice, “but in our case, in Teaneck, a mid-sized town, it poses a great threat to the budget as we see it.”

She went on further to say that there isn’t enough statistics that she could find that shows charter schools are doing better, and she compared how the district educates thousands of students, while only hundreds are educated at charter schools. “So when we talk about best practices, I think it’s a lot easier to implement and roll out an educational plan where there are only 300 kids in the school,” she said.

Rose said he’d like to see charter schools specialized at a county level and not within a township. His concern with charter schools is “a diminished financial effectiveness, which leads to a diminshed educational, academic and social effectiveness."

"I think that charter schools are not an enemy, but they are somewhat an obstacle," Rose said.

Walser said collaboration is needed with both types of institutions, but that oversight was lacking. 

“...the charter school is a valuable public system, but the system does not work in the way that they vet and fund them,” Walser said. 

The final question of the night asked about changes from last year’s budget to this year. 

“One of the biggest cuts that was made in this year’s budget that I think many people don’t realize is the cut in courtesy busing for students in grades one to four,” Sohn said. “I think that one of the factors we have to realize is that out of the roughly 400 students who are affected and their parents – we had a workshop meeting this past Wednesday evening – and four of those people showed up. I think there are at least 396 parents who have no idea that this is coming.”

Sohn said that a much better job needs to be done to reach out to parents to let them know what’s going on and to bring them to the schools to work with the PTO organizations to ensure that their children are in school.

When Rose mentioned the topic of busing at his turn, he said the issue isn’t quite over.

“I would have liked to have seen the courtesy busing, if it has to be decreased, decreased somewhat each year over a period of years, so it’s gradually brought in,” Rose said. 

He said if less funding ends up going to the second charter school, he hopes that additional money will be earmarked to restore courtesy busing to the older grades.

Walser said the BOE tried to be as open and as transparent as possible with the budget.

“Last year, we did a pretty good number in terms of losing a lot of our teachers, and so we could not go back to that,” Walser said. “We lost 45 teachers as Alan pointed out. We also lost four administrators and miraculously, we have actually found some way to do more with less, but we can’t keep doing that. We need Teaneck to pass this budget.”

Walser said the Board agonized over the issues of cutting courtesy busing and putting the nightly custodial staff on the chopping block.

“We were running out of money, and we needed to figure out a way,” Walser said. “As Howard said, we had the best of both worlds where the Teamsters union stepped to the plate, brought some money to the table and allowed us to give some way to work with that.”

In the end, those concessions saved the custodial positions and restored courtesy busing for only preschool and kindergarten.

Teaneck resident Cherise Canton said Monday night’s forum helped give her a better idea of which candidate she’d like to support.

Canton said she thought the proposed budget “could be better” and that recently appointed Superintendent of schools Barbara Pinsak was doing an “adequate” job. Pinsak previously held the position of interim superintendent of schools.

“She has a ways to go,” Canton said of Pinsak. “She is making more strides to reach out to the people. With the Sundays with the Superintendent."

Teaneck resident Balenda Nelson, who is also a graduate of THS, said the forum helped her to narrow down her choices on who to vote for.

“A lot of issues were presented in concise formats, some with some humor and some with seriousness, and I think that the voters would do very well to come out and support any of the candidates,” Nelson said.

Three seats are open on the BOE. Walser is seeking re-election, while current Trustee Joseph Cliffe is not. Current Trustee Margaret Angeli, whose seat is the third one up for re-election, was not present at Monday night's panel. She has not returned messages seeking comment.