No contest for
3 board seats
FREEHOLD TOWNSHIP — Three candidates have filed petitions to run for three seats on the Board of Education in the April 15 school election.
Dorothy Marlene Caruso and Rosina Hary are incumbents and Kay Poklemba-Holtz is a newcomer. Board member John Connell did not file a petition to run for re-election. Connell, 61, has served on the board for 21 years.
All of the terms on the board that administers the township’s K-8 school district are for three years.
Caruso, 70, of Woodcrest Drive retired from the Freehold Regional High School District in 1995 where she was director of the Medical Sciences Learning Center at Freehold Borough High School.
First elected to the board in 1993, she lost a re-election bid in 1996 and won her seat back in 1997. She ran again and won in 2000. At that time she was quoted in a News Transcript article as saying that she enjoys working on a board that has vision, is proactive, always puts the children first and is financially responsible.
Caruso is presently the township’s representative on the Freehold Regional High School District Board of Education.
Hary, 50, lives on Hunt Road and has been a board member for 13 years. She is seeking her fifth full term. The first time she ran it was for a one-year term. She is a homemaker and a licensed food safety inspector. She has three children who have gone through the township school system. One child is a freshman in high school.
Hary said that when her children were younger, she spent many years serving with PTAs in the school district.
There are many reasons why she has chosen to run again, but the main one, she said, is to see a major project that she was involved in starting through to completion — the building of the new elementary school on Wemrock Road.
Newcomer Poklemba-Holtz, 39, of Birch Hill Road, is seeking a seat on the board for the first time.
— Linda DeNicola