BY JOHN DUNPHY
Staff Writer
SAYREVILLE — Only three seats will become available on the Board of Education this spring, but no fewer than nine people want to occupy them.
The number of candidates may be an indication of the climate surrounding the school district, which has had its fair share of attention recently. There has been some controversy with matters such as the ongoing teacher contract negotiations, and the sudden retirement of former Superintendent of Schools Dennis Fyffe in December.
“I was not happy with the raise [the board of education] gave Dennis Fyffe,” said Phyllis Batko, 45, a former borough councilwoman who is running for the board on a combined ticket with Neil Gaglione and Thomas Biesiada. “Not only did they give him a raise, they gave him a paid leave of absence.”
Fyffe began a paid administrative leave on Jan. 1 that will run through the end of the school year. His contract, negotiated in 2003, would have eventually brought his salary to $178,000, a 29 percent increase over three years. The board’s majority said his salary needed to be brought in line with those of superintendents in similar school districts.
Besides Batko’s three-year term as a councilwoman, the Sayreville resident, who has a master’s degree in business administration from Rutgers Graduate School of Management, said she has been an active PTO member at Arleth School and now at Sayreville Middle School. She has two children, Michael, 15, and Kristen, 12, in borough schools.
As the only woman running for the board, Batko said it would be nice to bring the perspective of a woman, and a mother, to the all-male board.
“I’m running with eight men,” she said. “You can’t seem to get any other women involved.”
“Mothers tend to be very involved in education, [so] it’s nice to have a mother’s perspective up there,” she added.
Biesiada, 56, a fourth-generation Sayreville resident and a regular attendee at school board and Borough Council meetings, also spoke of Fyffe’s departure as an impetus for his decision to run.
“No one has been given an exact reason for this administrative leave,” he said.
Biesiada noted he “wants to see how money is spent” in the district.
Like Batko, Biesiada and Gaglione both have children in the school system.
“We want the money to go for the education of the children, that’s where the money should go,” he added. “There should be a limit of what goes to the top.”
In addition, Biesiada said he would be strongly in favor of impact fees being placed on developers looking to build more properties in the borough. Though impact fees cannot be used for educational purposes, he said they can be used for infrastructure, which would ultimately benefit the school district.
Gaglione, a borough resident since 1996, who has two children, Julie, 6, and Emma, 4, said he wants to be more involved in how his children are educated.
“When my older daughter, [Elizabeth, now 20], was going through the school, I felt there was a more stable environment,” he said. “I just feel there are now a lot of loose ends that need to be tied up.”
“It just seems, from talking to people, that there is just a general unhappiness and lack of public support for the current board,” he added.
Arthur Rittenhouse, one of two incumbents seeking re-election to the board, said the current board has made a lot of improvements within the district.
Rittenhouse, 60, who has been on the board for nine years, said he would like to finish a number of things he has already started, including looking at ways to reduce the over-reliance on property taxes to fund schools, as well as his work on the legislative committee for District 19 of the New Jersey School Boards Association.
He said the board’s spending has been kept low while the quality of education has improved.
“We’re the 10th-lowest per-pupil spending district in the state, in the 130 K-12 districts,” he said. “But yet our test scores continue to improve where most times, when you spend that little, your test scores tend to not go up. We’ve seemed to be the exception to that rule.”
Despite Rittenhouse’s praises of the current board’s work, new candidate Michael Macagnone said there is a mind-set among board members that he has a problem with.
“You give a 40 percent increase in salary to the superintendent and then he resigns with the contract still intact,” he said. “Then we have the people that spend six, seven hours a day with our children who still don’t have a contract.”
Macagnone, 44, moved from Brooklyn to the borough in 1996 with his wife of 22 years, Gail, and three children — Tasha, 21, a 2000 Sayreville War Memorial High School graduate, Nicolette, 17, a junior at the high school, and Christa, 13, an eighth-grader at the middle school.
He works for the Jackson Township Board of Education as head of the aerospace science department. He is also a current member of the Sayreville Planning Board and was a member of the Board of Education’s Blue Ribbon Committee for the proposed $45 million referendum to renovate the high school.
Candidate Pat Lembo also cited Fyffe’s retirement as an issue in this election season.
“While in the midst of an unresolved teachers’ contract, it’s hard to justify paying somebody to sit at home,” he said. “I’m basically unhappy with the way some things have been going.”
Lembo, 49, has lived in the borough since 1985. His two daughters, Jordanna, 13, and Julianna, 10, are students in the district.
Though Lembo, a PTO member at the Upper Elementary School, admits that finding new ways to fund schools is easier said than done, that is what he would like to work toward as a board member.
“I really think we need to make an effort to do that,” he said. “I don’t think it’s very fair for senior citizens’ taxes to go up every year because of school budgets. There really needs to be a more equitable, broad-base tax other than property tax to fund the school system.”
William Lewis said concern regarding the education of his children was a strong reason why he decided to run.
“I just would like to be more involved,” said Lewis, the 43-year-old father of Brittany, 14, a freshman at the high school, and Stephanie, 13, an eighth-grader at the middle school.
Born in Hoboken and raised in Jersey City, Lewis moved to Sayreville in 1992. In addition to his regular job working for the federal government in the Department of Homeland Security, Lewis has found time to coach for the Sayreville Athletic Association girls’ softball team, as well as to contribute time to the middle school PTO. His wife, Joan, is the vice president.
“[I would like to see] more accountability to the taxpayers,” he said. “Hopefully, get the general public more in tune with what’s going on and know where the money is going.”
Macagnone stressed that he is “not a politician.
“I have no agenda,” he said. “But I feel I have a vested interest as a taxpayer and a father of children in this district.”
Biesiada said ethics and efficiency are needed.
“I would like to see us provide the best education for the dollar amounts we have,” he said.
“I think it’s time for a change,” Batko said.
Rittenhouse said he hopes all of the candidates are running for the right reasons.
“That is the education of the children of Sayreville,” he said. “You have to keep the taxpayers in mind, but the bottom line is the children and the education they get.”
Candidates Daniel Harding and incumbent Ronald Van Tine could not be reached for comment for this article.
Van Tine has been on the board since 1998. He served for four years in the U.S. Coast Guard and attended Staten Island Community College.
Joseph Bera, whose term is also up this year, is not running for re-election.