West Orange Resident Sets Sights On NJ Assembly Seat: 2025 Election

WEST ORANGE, NJ — A West Orange resident is kicking his campaign for a state Assembly seat into high gear as the 2025 primary election draws closer in New Jersey.

Blake Michael, a high school teacher and a special education attorney from Essex County, is running as a Democrat for New Jersey Assembly in the 27th district.

A primary election will take place on June 10. The general election is set for Nov. 4.

The 27th district includes the towns of Livingston, Millburn, Montclair, Roseland and West Orange in Essex County, and Clifton in Passaic County.

Michael is campaigning under the slogan: “Teacher Fighting for School Funding” – a theme that appears prominently on his campaign website.

“With all of the chaos in Washington around education and education funding, I feel like it's my responsibility to do what I can to strengthen our education system in New Jersey,” Michael recently told Patch.

So far, the three biggest issues that he’s spoken about with voters include:

• Universal pre-K
• Stabilizing school funding (revisiting the school funding formula and awarding school aid over multiple years with a mechanism for adjustment)
• Expanding the Garden State Guarantee to cover all four years of college tuition

Michael hammered on the theme of universal pre-K in a recent op-ed posted on Patch. Read More: ‘You Shouldn't Have To Win The Lottery To Go To Preschool!’

“In my conversations with voters across our district, people describe how tired they are of getting the short end of the stick,” he wrote. “They're tired of paying the town, the county, the state, and Washington—and then being forced to write a check for preschool tuition. Their frustration isn't unreasonable - a handful of states across the country have already made universal pre-K a reality without charging their residents $15,000 a year in property taxes.”

Michael continued:

“The state's failure to provide universal pre-K has real consequences for our communities. Take West Orange, for example: a family could pay $15,000 in property taxes before finding out they didn’t win the town preschool lottery. That family will now need to find another $10,000 for preschool or shell out thousands for child care—all while paying up to 10% in state income tax. For some families, this means serious cutbacks; for others, a second or third job.”

“That’s a bad trade,” he wrote.

Other planks of Michael’s campaign include:

FULLY FUNDED SCHOOLS – “We need to revisit how we fund our public schools to prevent wild swings in funding. The current school formula is leaving our local school systems with multi-million-dollar deficits. We need to revisit it in a transparent process that includes community input. We also need to find a way to avoid wild year-to-year swings in school funding. School funding should be awarded for three-years at a time with opportunities for schools to apply for additional funding due to increased enrollment.”

EXPANDED COLLEGE ACCESS – “We need to expand the Garden State Guarantee to cover all four years of undergraduate tuition. Each year, thousands of eligible New Jersey students take advantage of the Garden State Guarantee, a program which provides two years of college tuition to eligible graduates. Currently, the program requires students to attend two years of community college before applying. This leads many students to take unnecessary classes to fulfill the two year-requirement and denies students the opportunity to make important on-campus connections during their freshman and sophomore year.”

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