The Jericho Board of Education unanimously elected Sam Perlman as president and Jennifer Vartanov as vice president at its Thursday, July 10 meeting. The meeting marked a first for Robert Kravitz, who started his position as superintendent this month, and trustee Kenny Jin, who was elected in May.
The meeting covered a wide breadth of topics from new leadership to potential legal action.
David Cohen, assistant superintendent, spoke about Jericho’s choice to implement new state science exams early. The new versions of the Earth Science and Biology regents were administered in June and aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards.
Cohen reported that while the passing rates stayed consistent with previous years, the mastery rates dropped significantly. The earth science mastery rate fell from 69-74% to 41% and the biology mastery rate fell from 81-92% to 56%.
Kim Libertini, the district’s science and technology curriculum director, conducted a deep analysis of the data.
“In her analysis, she found that many questions were vague, included a lot of jargon and misleading information, often in graphs and charts that had a lot of external information that wasn’t relevant and pertinent to the actual question itself,” Cohen said, “therefor making those questions harder than what we believe they needed to be.”
Going forward, the board will decide whether to continue the early test option for chemistry and physics or to go back to the old exams.
Reorganization meetings are meant to elect new leadership and set the agenda for the upcoming year. Kravitz, the newly appointed superintendent, led one of his first meetings in his new position.
“Thank you for the warm welcoming that I have received so far in the last ten days in the Jericho public schools,” he said.
A motion was made to elect Perlman to step into the position of board president. The position was previously held by Christopher Foresto whose term expired this year and he opted to not run for re-election. Perlman and Foresto ran against each other for the position of board president for the 2024-2025 school year with Foresto obtaining the majority vote of four to one.
This year the board unanimously approved the election of Perlman.
“I want to thank my fellow board members for the confidence they’re showing in me,” Perlman said.
After being sworn into his position, Perlman opened the floor for board vice president nominations before nominating Vartanov, a current trustee. Vartanov’s vote was unopposed so she was appointed to the position for the 2025-2026 school year.
After the appointment of the board president and vice president, Perlman moved the meeting’s focus to upcoming meeting dates by informing the Board and the attendees of a date change.
The next meeting, which was scheduled for Aug. 7, will be moved to Aug. 4 at 7:30 p.m.
After a 10-minute recess toward the end of the meeting, the board voted for a walk-on resolution to authorize Ingerman Smith LLP to “commence litigation against a former employee of the district.” After no further discussion surrounding the topic, the board voted 3-2 on the resolution.
Pearlman, Vartanov and Jin voted to approve the resolution, while trustees Jill Citron and Divya Balachandar were opposed.
When contacted after the meeting, Pearlman declined to comment on the resolution.
