Mineola School Board Selects Matzer to Fill Hale’s Seat

The members of the Mineola Board of Education have chosen Nicole Matzer to take over the open seat on the board for the 2013-14 school year.

The chair was occupied by board vice-president Terence Hale, who was forced to resign last month following the serving of papers by trustee Irene Parrino against both Hale and the board over comments made by Hale via e-mail. Parrino was ousted from her board seat in the May election by Patricia Navarra. There is only one year remaining in the term for Hale’s seat.

“I think he’s a wonderful individual who’s really given of his time to this school district and should absolutely be proud of his accomplishments with that time and his volunteerism; it’s really something,” Matzer said of Hale’s contributions to the board.

The board had received only two applications of interest for the open seat, one from Matzer and the other from Bryan Bradley. The board held a closed session meeting on June 27 at the Willis Avenue School, interviewing each applicant for about 30 minutes before settling on Matzer. It was not known which trustees voted for which candidate and no trustees spoke about how they voted following the meeting. The board also held interviews with candidates for the principal position at the Jackson Avenue School that evening.

“We would like to thank Mr. Bradley for his interest and his time and his passion for the district,” board president William Hornberger said.

Bradley, 64, is a computer programmer and has lived in Mineola for the past 10 years. He has a son entering ninth grade and his daughter is currently in the middle school. He was also a member of the finance committee for eight years and the “zero-based budgeting committee” with Hornberger where “one of the things we recommended was that they look at reconfiguration.”

Bradley previously ran for the board several times, but lost his most recent bid in 2006 to John McGrath.

“I’ve been interested in the affairs of the board all along,” he said, noting that he was in support of the district’s reconfiguration. “I’ve been on the finance committee for a long time. I think continue with the path they’ve been on recently, trying to improve the curriculum, trying to make sure that fiscally that the school district’s sound; that was one of the reasons I got involved was because when I first started going to board meetings, when they talked about the budget, you could make no sense of it because there was no transparency.”

Matzer, the first person to be interviewed Thursday night, has previously volunteered in the district, starting as the PTO president of the Willis Avenue School for two years when her daughter was at the school. She also served as district council co-president with Cindy Velez two years ago and finished with Mary Desidario this year. She resides in Mineola and moved to the district in 1999 with her husband Eric. A stay-at-home mom, she has a son going into seventh grade and a daughter going into third grade this fall and also teaches catechism at St. Aidan’s.

“I thought it was the right time,” she said when asked about her decision to put her name forward for the seat. “It’s a different outlook that I’m excited to learn this side of the school district. Of course the parent side and the PTA side, this is going to be different, this is the business side and the academic side.”

Matzer said that the board members were grilling her with questions “to an extent,” but that “the questioning was very fair; just my thoughts on different things in the district, the curriculum and where do I see the district (going).”

When questioned about reconfiguration, Matzer stated that she did favor the choices that were made within the school district adding that “I personally have not had any regrets with that with my children.”

Though she said that she was not focused on any specific issues as of yet, when asked to share her views of the district she said that she sees “the district in five years with their scores progressively getting higher, excelling and our programs, keeping our programs and expanding them from where they are now and I see this district just getting better and better each year.”

Both Matzer and Navarra will be sworn in at the July 2 reorganizational meeting.

“That’s the hope that we can start focusing on education and the students because that’s what the school district is all about - the students - and just onward and upward,” Matzer said.

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