By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Four first-time candidates appealed to voters on Thursday to put them on the Princeton School Board for the next three years during a time when they will make critical decisions about facilities, employee contracts and the leadership of the district.
In an election with no incumbents on the ballot, Deborah Bronfeld, Gregory M. Stankiewicz, William D. Hare and Alex Martin are seeking the three seats up for grabs on Nov. 8. For nearly an hour at a League of Women Voters forum, they answered questions about the state of the district, their views on school spending and other topics.
“My goal is to help improve things. I think there’s a lot of things we do very well. And I think there’s some things we can probably do better,” said Mr. Martin, the CEO of Puricore, a bio-pharmaceutical company based in Pennsylvania.
On more money for education, Mr. Stankiewicz said all schools in New Jersey are under-funded — and pinned the blame on the Christie administration. As a board member, he said he would “push hard” for “the resources that our students need across the state.”
“The state of New Jersey is under-funding all our schools,” he said.
Ms. Bronfield said she could not say whether the district is underfunded. She proposed working with Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study to bring money into the district. Both of them voluntarily contribute money each year to the municipal government, but give nothing, in comparison, to the district despite children of IAS and University faculty and staff attending the public schools.
Picking up on that theme, Mr. Hare suggested going to “some of these institutions that aren’t supporting the schools through their taxes as much and see if they’d be willing to contribute.”
In terms of approving a budget going over the 2-percent-cap, Mr. Hare said: “I wouldn’t want to raise it beyond the cap, unless it was really something that we needed. And I’d really want it to be justified.”
With the exception of Ms. Bronfield, the other three candidates had children who went to Princeton Charter School, a sometimes lightning rod in the community during debates over school funding.
“I would like to think the Charter School figures out ways to be innovative,” said Mr. Hare, who said that on the school board, he would look to the Charter School to learn things that could be applied in the district.
Mr. Stankiewicz said more broadly about charter schools, he found that they lead to “increased segregation.”
“And the reason they do is that there’s a difference in the type of student body from host districts,” he said. “And if you have a difference in student body, you’re going to have issues like that.”
He also stressed the need for “local control” and advocated that future charter schools should not be allowed to open unless the host community wants them. Mr. Stankiewicz’s wife, Julia Sass Rubin, a Rutgers faculty member, helped start the advocacy group Save our Schools, and is an often-cited critic of charter schools.
With the memory of the strained contract negotiations with the teachers union fresh in the memory, the candidates were asked what they would do to avoid a repeat of those problems the next time around. The agreement with the Princeton Regional Education Association will end in June 2018.
“I think the challenge, at the end of the day, is that the teachers union is going to represent the interests of the teachers, and the teachers need that,” Mr. Martin said. “But that might sometimes be a little bit different than what’s in the needs of the students.”
Ms. Bronfield offered that she wanted to start talking with teachers a year in advance, having an “open conversation in the beginning.”
“I’m not going to say we’re going to be on the same page,” she continued, “but we’re going to be talking. We’re going to be talking, and we’re going to be listening.”
Later in the evening, the candidates weighed in on state standardized testing. Mr. Stankiewicz criticized the Partnership for College and Career Readiness exams students have to take, commonly known as PARCC. School officials oppose using the exam as a graduation requirement.
“PARCC was a test that was rolled out too quickly, has too many issues and hasn’t been validated yet,” he said. “In effect, I believe that we’ve been using our children as guinea pigs for a test that hasn’t been validated yet.”
Ms. Bronfield, who opposes PARCC, said she had allowed one of her sons to opt out of taking the exam—a move that many other parents in the district took.
“I mean, there’s definitely communities within the country which need some testing to monitor your teachers and everything. I don’t feel we need that here. I feel you need some testing to see where your kids fall.”
None of the candidates, however, were asked their views on the school bond referendum the district is in the midst of planning for or what they thought of third-year Superintendent of Schools Stephen C. Cochrane’s job performance. Whoever will be on the board starting in January will have to make decisions about the referendum and whether Mr. Cochrane stays with the district past his current contract.
This year, incumbents Andrea Spalla, Molly Chrein and Tom Hagedorn declined to run for re-election, a move that opened the door for new faces to join the board. All four candidates have advanced degrees, including three with MBAs.
Ms. Bronfield, who works for Mercer Street Friends Food Bank, holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and her MBA from Babson College.
Mr. Hare, an attorney, earned his undergraduate degree from Clemson University and his law degree and his MBA from the University of Houston. He also holds master’s degrees from Clemson and Johns Hopkins University.
Mr. Stankiewicz is the chief operating officer of New Jersey Community Capital, a nonprofit that finances affordable housing and other facilities in the state. He holds degrees from Harvard and Princeton universities, including his doctorate from Princeton.
Mr. Martin graduated from Cornell University and Harvard Business School.
