By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
The four Princeton school board candidates said Thursday that their professional experience would help them deal with major issues in the coming years of reaching a new teachers contract and setting the size and scope of the upcoming facilities bond referendum.
Debbie Bronfeld, Bill Hare, Alex Martin and Gregory Stankiewicz, appearing at a roughly 90-minute forum at John Witherspoon Middle School, tried to make the case for why voters should chose them Nov. 8 in a race for three seats.
The winners will join a school board facing decisions within the next three years about the referendum, the teachers’ contract and whether to keep Superintendent of Schools Stephen C. Cochrane past when his current contract is up.
Mr. Martin, the head of a biotech company, touted his professional credentials.
“I’ve been running companies for years, serving on boards, so this is what I do,” said Mr. Martin, a graduate of Harvard Business School. “I negotiate, I make changes when necessary.”
Mr. Hare, an attorney, said he had helped start a clinical study company where decisions had to make about employee compensation and whether to keep employees or not.
“In terms of facilities, I’m a planner, so I like to look at all the details. So I’d look at the budget and I’d look at the income and all that coming in and watch it that way,” said Ms. Bronfeld, an MBA who works for Mercer Street Friends Food Bank.
Mr. Stankiewicz pointed to how he had worked at the New York City Board of Education, his first “real job,” in his words, as a deputy director in the office of budget operations and review. “I sat at negotiating tables with the teachers unions and with other stakeholders,” he said.
Up until around two years ago, he was the chief operating officer of a nonprofit that did financing of housing and community facilities.
“So we did financing and putting together very large, intricate and really interesting deals,” he continued. “And I think I can leverage some of those skills in terms of thinking about facilities here for the future in terms of how we expand.”
The district finds itself looking at a referendum amid an enrollment jump, thanks to new residential developments that are expected to add even more children to the school system when those residential units are fully occupied. Mr. Hare touched on the issue in his remarks.
“So this is part of the whole thing about the growth of the town,” he said, “and I feel like we need to let our governing body — the council and the mayor — know if you approve a project, you gotta make sure that the tax money comes to pay for the kids and the special services. And if you’re not going to do it, don’t approve it.”
All four candidates are running for office for the first time. If elected to the school board, Mr. Martin said he believes he could help drive “positive change.”
“I like to import best practices,” he continued. “I think that there are things we could learn from other systems.”
He raised, for instance, trying to have an endowment, to reduce some of the burden from taxpayers.
On negotiating a new contract with the teachers union when the current one expires, Ms. Bronfeld spoke of wanting to sit down with the union soon rather than later.
“And when I’m on the board,” she said, “I would start talking to the teachers this coming spring, so that we are all communicating earlier and often and just hearing each other out.”
Thursday’s forum was sponsored by the Special Education PTO, so the candidates’ views on special education figured prominently in the discussion.
“So I’d try to keep them in the general ed(ucation program) wherever possible,” Mr. Hare said of special education students.
Mr. Stankiewicz called inclusion “the effective and the moral thing to do.”
“All students benefit from an understanding of each of our unique attributes and needs,” he said.
