SOUTH ORANGE / MAPLEWOOD, NJ — November’s South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education election looks to be full of tough discussions, with five candidates running for three open seats, each for three years. Incumbents Stephanie Lawson-Muhammad and Johanna Wright will be vying to reclaim their seats against challengers Anthony Mazzocchi, Susie Adamson and James Henry Davis III, who is running a joint campaign with Lawson-Muhammad. Veteran board member Beth Daugherty is not seeking reelection.
This school board election season, top issues will likely be keeping taxes manageable without cheating the students, the tax inequality between South Orange and Maplewood, improving academics without breaking the bank, increasing transparency and parent support, taking a closer look at Harassment, Intimidation and Bullying, and making teachers feel heard and respected.
South Orange’s Lawson-Muhammad, who is now completing her first term on the board, believes that to improve the South Orange-Maplewood School District, there has to be a culture shift, which — like any well-implemented change — takes time.
“Trust and respect are prerequisites for believing that all students are capable of high achievement. The board cannot simply command this to happen,” Lawson-Muhammad told the News-Record earlier this week via email. “In 2015, I pushed for adoption of the board’s cultural competency policy, intended to enable teachers to see their students with fresh eyes. Teachers need to learn from one another how to build effective relationships with all students and find the hidden potential in each of them. We need to enable our building principals to help teachers learn from one another, raise each other’s expectations and make engaging all students a consistent theme throughout each school.”
To ensure this change happens, Lawson-Muhammad stressed the importance of having “stable, effective leadership; consistent public support; and a board which is demanding and patient at the same time.” But she believes these changes can be achieved, citing that, in the past three years, even with three different superintendents, the district instituted policies to deal with HIB, access and equity, staff conduct, athletic codes of conduct, and protections for transgender and gender-nonconforming students.
She looks forward to continuing her work to improve the district’s special education services, teaching and learning, as well as hiring, evaluating and retaining quality teachers — all while engaging with parents and other stakeholders in the community.
Continuing her trend of speaking out and not following the crowd, Wright, a former teacher and sports coach in the district, is running for her second term as well; she plans to continue listening to parents, stakeholders and students.
“The words ‘listen’ and ‘silent’ have the same letters, so I am silent while listening, but I am never silent when it comes to defending the people I have been elected to serve,” Wright, a South Orange resident, told the News-Record via email earlier this week, citing her voting record on the board, which includes voting to remove the International Baccalaureate program that was garnering a lot of criticism, voting against budgets she felt were insufficient and voting to keep all district librarian positions, among others.
“Each time I voted, know it was after researching the issue and applying my many years of teaching and coaching experience in the district,” Wright said. “It was to do what was right for our school community and our children. Ask the children … and then listen to what they say.”
If re-elected, Wright plans to focus on creating a new process to recruit and retain experienced and qualified staff; gathering teacher input in developing professional development; doing trial runs of programs before new policies are voted on; introducing more shared services in an effort to lower both school and municipal taxes; investigating new revenue sources; and rooting out the causes of issues that put students and staff’s safety at risk by eliminating “Band-Aid solutions.”
Mazzocchi is approaching this election from multiple vantage points — as a taxpayer, an educator and a Maplewood resident for approximately 30 years, who attended Tuscan Elementary, Maplewood Middle and Columbia High schools in his youth.
“I believe that we need to spend less time ranking our children and far more time helping them find their talents and passions,” Mazzocchi told the News-Record via email late last week. “Our system should not be a prolonged college entrance game based on defining our students by the tests they take.”
Professionally, the Grammy-nominated Mazzocchi has served as director of fine and performing arts in the SOMSD; he is currently the associate director of the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University and executive director of the Kinhaven Summer Music School in Weston, Vt.
“I believe our district needs more transparency in its communication and fiscal matters, and more effective administration and board governance when it comes to assessing initiatives,” Mazzocchi said. “I know exactly what it takes to manage and ‘mind the house,’ yet still grow and thrive through effective vision planning. I believe we need more educators determining education policy and I am proud and honored to run this year.”
With an eye on the two towns’ diverse community, Adamson draws on the strength she received from her parents, who were immigrants from Korea in the 1970s and who worked around-the-clock to ensure Adamson and her sister had every opportunity. Adamson now lives in South Orange with her mixed-race family.
In her schooling, Adamson saw the impact being raised in an English-as-a-second-language home had on her education. She told the News-Record in a recent email that, in college, she “learned the important distinction between prejudice and racism and how both persist in our culture far more than we often care to face.”
Within the community, Adamson served as a Seth Boyden PTA president and President’s Council co-president, at which time she became “discouraged” as she saw the struggles within public education.
“The problems facing public education in this country, this state and this district are monumental and they sometimes seem insurmountable,” Adamson said. “Despite decades of effort, there is a persistent achievement gap and racial inequality. There is too much unproductive fighting, finger pointing and blame shifting.”
If elected, Adamson plans to focus her energies on helping children who come from homes where English is not the primary language and who therefore may not be receiving the English language assistance at home that they require; rethinking curriculum and its delivery, the disciplinary system, and professional development; examining and confronting individual prejudices and the district’s systemic racism in order to move beyond these problems; and by implementing initiatives based on data collected by measuring results.
“We all want a rigorous and engaging education for our children, a community that embraces and celebrates each of our families, and real estate that we can afford and doesn’t cripple us,” Adamson said.
Davis, also a South Orange resident, hopes to use his professional experience working for corporate boards and serving on nonprofit boards to improve the BOE’s governance and the district. Specifically, he wanted to strengthen board oversight of education practices to make certain the district is serving each child in the way they need. He also plans to work to make financial planning and budgeting a less doom-and-gloom process through fiscal responsibility.
“We need to get out of the annual school budget crisis mode and make sure that we are able to sustain our school system for the long haul,” Davis told the News-Record earlier this week via email. “That means improving the way the board analyzes trends and ensuring that we better understand the long-term implications in terms of both cost and educational outcomes when we make budget decisions. The more we can improve our financial decision-making process, the better our chances of preserving and enhancing all the things that make our district special, like, for example, our arts programs.”
Davis is also excited to support Superintendent John Ramos Sr.’s new strategic planning initiative, which has been creating enthusiasm and “concrete proposals for change.”
“I expect many of those proposals will require long-term commitment from the board and community and require a change in mindset and daily practice from all of us if the proposed enhancements are to have a positive impact on our district’s educational culture,” Davis said.
The South Orange-Maplewood BOE election will coincide with the general election on Nov. 8. So, while voting for president, be sure to cast a vote for the Board of Ed candidates.
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