Floral Park-Bellerose’s Board of Education welcomed an array of new faces that will lead the district through the 2025-26 school year on Monday evening.
The district swore in its new superintendent, Anthony Lubrano, who takes over from interim superintendent Lisa Ruiz; new Trustee Victor Ferrante; and new clerk Kalystra ChooChew at its annual reorganization meeting.
Lubrano comes to the district from his previous position as assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction at Hicksville Public Schools. He had been with that district for over 18 years, where he also served as a principal.
Ferrante, a regular attendee of board meetings prior to his election, said he was looking forward to working with the district in the coming months.
“Most importantly, I’ll be working to find what the teachers need support for and, of course, supporting our students,” Ferrante said after his first meeting. “I’m looking forward to getting a better idea of what we can do to improve things.”
Ferrante, a retired NYPD officer with two sons in the district, won a closely contested May race against Lauren Persic for former Board Vice President Michael Culotta’s seat. He decided to step down at the end of his term.
The board unanimously appointed Trustee Michelle Vincent to fill Culotta’s former vice president position. This will be her first year serving in the role and second on the board.
The board also voted to reappoint Jaclyn O’Donohue to a second term as president. All voted in favor of her reappointment, except Trustee Laura Trentacoste, who declined to provide a comment on her vote, but emphasized her commitment to working collaboratively with everyone on the board.
“I serve our community. Putting our school community first is what I’m here for, and that goes ahead of all egos, including my own,” Trentacoste said. “The five of us are going to work together and hopefully we’re gonna have a wonderful and productive year.”
O’Donohue also expressed an eagerness to work productively with the other board members as she leads the board into the next school year.
“I think that we’re going to do really great things this year,” O’Donohue said. “I’m excited to work with our brand new superintendent and help him to build a team that he will work really well with. I think all of us as trustees together will really do well for our district.”
Trustee Rose Peltonen, who successfully won a second term after an uncontested May election, was also sworn in Monday night. Along with O’Donohue, she was unanimously reappointed to continue serving as a trustee on the Sewanhaka Central High School District Board of Education.
It will be Peltonen’s fourth year and O’Donohue’s second as a Sewanhaka trustee. All four of the elementary districts that feed into the Sewanhaka district appoint two members of their boards to serve on the high school board.
The board also used the meeting to review and readopt the district’s code of conduct, an annual practice.
While no members of the public had any comments on the matter, Trustees Trentacoste and Peltonen requested minor corrections and emphasized the need for printed copies to be distributed to all students at the start of the next school year and for the creation of a teacher-parent-student advisor council to better serve district families.
“Parents and students should have a hard copy of the code of conduct, not just have it electronically, where parents might not even realize that they have to do a thorough read,” Peltonen said. “I think it’s such an important piece of our schooling, so I want to be sure that every parent, every child, can really have a hard copy of it, read it, take it home, digest it, sign it and bring it back.”
“At the end of the code of conduct, it states that we may want to appoint an advisory committee of staff, parents and students,” Trentacoste said. “I would like us to discuss that because I think that’s a direction that can be very beneficial to our students and to our school environment as a whole.”
Other trustees agreed with both, and the board said it would look into both matters before the next meeting.
The district’s next meeting, which will include a review of a new cell phone policy that will be formed in response to the governor’s bell-to-bell phone ban in school buildings, will take place on Aug. 7.
