BOE candidates face the RVC community at Q & A forum

The five candidates vying for two seats on the Rockville Centre Board of Education next year faced their fellow residents and answered some hard-hitting questions during a moderated forum Monday night at the South Side Middle School auditorium.

The two-hour event, which was sponsored by the Rockville Centre Council of PTAs with assistance from the League of Women Voters, gave candidates an opportunity to share their visions and opinions on various school topics in hopes of persuading residents to vote for them on May 16.

This year’s candidates are Wayne Fitzgerald, Tara Hackett, Susan McNulty, Gregg Spaulding and Liz Stack. Spaulding is the only one seeking re-election to the board, where he has spent the past seven years.

Residents were given the opportunity to submit questions either prior to the event or in advance. Moderator Pat Simpson from the League of Women Voters asked nine questions to the panel, including inquiries about board transparency, the Common Core opt-out movement, class balancing, the district’s drop in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, the budget, diplomas for special education students and what the board should be look for in hiring the next superintendent. Each candidate was given 90 seconds to answer the question and made opening and closing statements.

All five candidates agreed that transparency should be the top priority of board members and that the current board should have been more forthcoming with the resignation of Superintendent Dr. William Johnson. Susan McNulty, the principal of the Nassau BOCES Carmans Road School, said the huge turnout of candidates may have been as a result of that process.

“I think transparency was what brought so many candidates out to run this year,” she said. “I think that people were concerned about what went on with Dr. Johnson and the question around transparency.”

The candidates were also in agreement on most of the other issues that were asked at the forum, but did differ in others.

Fitzgerald, an employee of the global investment management corporation BlackRock, said he would formulate future budgets with a “zero-based” approach and build it “from the ground up.” A zero-based budget is when expenses get subtracted from income to equal zero. Hackett responded by saying that his approach would be “time and resource intensive” and it would not “account for some of the rolling things and the investments we made into our school districts.”

“I would definitely caution against something like that,” she said.

Fitzgerald also expressed his frustration over the information he received from the class-balancing committee.

“I think the community should be involved in everything,” he said. “One of the frustrations I had with the class-balancing committee is that it was a closed process and the community was not invited. It was just a PTA presidents and board and administration function.”

Hackett took exception to that accusation.

“We’re not just PTA presidents,” she said. “I think that we are all volunteers and people that take a lot of time. We are representatives of our schools and that’s part of the job. I wouldn’t reduce it.”

Stack, a certified ELA teacher who has taught in several New York-area public schools and colleges, built a campaign around her disdain for the Common Core and state testing and continued to speak out about it when that question arose.

“I have a lot of problems with Common Core,” she said. “I think there’s less of an emphasis on writing, literature, fiction, creative writing, imagination and interaction and social play. I believe the Rockville Centre schools are actually dragged down by these standards.”’

Spaulding said he tried his best to express his experiences and accomplishments during his time on the board.

“A minute and a half is not enough time,” he said after the session. “Those were very complex questions. The board does a lot and to try to explain it in a minute and a half, I would have been cut off. So [I] gave the people the items they wanted to hear and move on, and that’s what I did.”

The Rockville Centre Herald will be providing biographies on each of the candidates in upcoming issues. Fitzgerald and Hackett are being featured on page 14, followed by McNulty, Spaulding and Stack in the May 11 edition.