Four vying for three Board of Education seats

East Meadow School District residents will not only vote on the 2016-17 budget on May 17. They will also decide who will sit on their Board of Education.

Trustees are elected to specific seats each year. Three incumbents — Joseph Parisi, Marcee Rubinstein and Jeffrey Rosenking — are seeking re-election. Matthew Melnick, a parent of a Barnum Woods Elementary School kindergarten student, is challenging Rosenking, while Parisi and Rubinstein are running unopposed.

Melnick, a 38-year-old attorney, has lived in East Meadow for eight years. The father of three young children — including a 6-year-old daughter Natalya, who is in one of the district’s first full-day kindergarten classes — said he is running for a board seat because he wants to contribute more to the community. “With the important task of hiring a permanent superintendent and a vested interest in helping to keep things moving in the right direction, I made the decision to run this year,” he explained, referring to the search that will begin this summer for a permanent top administrator to replace interim Superintendent Leon Campo.

The incumbents also cited the superintendent search as a top issue that the board will tackle next year. Parisi, who has been the board’s president for five years, said he thinks it is already well positioned to take on this challenge, and trustees look forward to receiving residents’ input in focus groups.

“The important housekeeping tasks have been taken care of and we have a timeline,” Parisi said. “I want to be completely transparent with the community throughout this process to make sure they know everything that’s happening with the search.”

In the contested race, Melnick and Rosenking each said they had other goals and issues they would like to work on if elected. Whether it’s the former’s status as the head of a young family or the latter’s decades of experience serving the community as a volunteer, both candidates said they believe their backgrounds would suit them well as board members.