Two Oyster Bay-East Norwich Board of Education seats are up for grabs and the four candidates running for the positions officially introduced themselves to the public at the Monday, May 4 Meet the Candidates night at Oyster Bay High School. Running for the two seats are current board member Maryann Santos and Oyster Bay residents David Asher, Todd Cronin and Laurie Kowalsky. Harris Dinkoff of the League of Women’s Voters, moderated the event. The four candidates received plenty of questions from members of the audience.
One of the questions pertained to New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo’s position on Common Core test scores and their relation to a teacher’s evaluation process.
Kowalsky, a mother of three children in the school district, said she is a supporter of standardized testing in the schools, but does not believe results should be tied with a teachers performance.
“I think that if we follow that process it will create an atmosphere of teaching towards the test,” said Kowalsky. “I don’t want our students to lose their creativeness in the classroom.”
Responding to the same question, Santos said she is also against tying teachers performance with test scores.
“A child might have learned subject matter that is not reflective in the test scores and then that might say that the teacher is not an effective teacher and that’s not the case,” said Santos. “I think we need to look at qualitative over quantitative measurements.”
Another question asked was what was the candidates opinions of tenure for teachers.
Asher, a 15-year Oyster Bay resident with three kids in the school district, said that the tenure system needs substantial work.
“In my experience in having kids in this school system, I think that some teachers need to move on,” said Asher. “I’ve seen teachers who wouldn’t embrace technology in the classroom and teachers in the system who were just not delivering to our children.”
He added that he doesn’t want to see teachers who feel they don’t need to meet certain expectations because of the tenure system.
Cronin, a retired Nassau County Police officer, believes a merit or other incentive program might be an idea for teachers.
“Maybe a fiscal incentive or days off might be a motivating thing for teachers,” said Cronin.
The importance of offering foreign language classes early in a student’s career was another point that was brought up.
Asher spoke about his own scholastic career and said that when he was attending elementary school in Hicksville he was exposed to a Spanish language program in first grade.
“By the time I was a freshman in high school I was taking a senior level Spanish course and was fluent in the language,” said Asher.
He said that dropping foreign language from a student’s course load would be “unconscionable” and “a lot of people in other countries are speaking multiple languages now. We as a country are way behind the rest of the world when it comes to learning new languages.”
The trustee election will be held alongside the budget vote on Tuesday, May 19 from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. at Oyster Bay High School.
The next board of education meeting will be held in the Oyster Bay High School library on Tuesday, May 26 at 8 p.m.
Read more about the 2015-16 proposed budget and view the district’s calendar at www.obenschools.org.
