By Walter Elliott
IRVINGTON / NEWARK – Registered voters in Irvington and Newark are to pick three people each from an overall candidate field of 11 for their respective public boards of education April 19.
Township and city voters will also get to approve or deny their public school districts’ 2022-23 budgets. Irvington and Newark are the only “Local Talk” area towns that have direct polling say in their school budgets.
IRVINGTON voters, while approving four candidates for as many township board of education seats, will also have two new faces to approve $17,459,529.
Janelle Lowery, for example, is looking for her first full three-year Irvington Board of Education term. Lowery was appointed to the board July 7 after the June 30 resignation of longtime member and former IBOE president Richard Williams.
Lowery is on the same ticket with veteran members Luis Antilus and Joseph Sylvain. Sylvain and Antilus had openly run on the “Irvington Schools Strong” ticket in 2019.
“Irvington Schools Strong” is the school board version of Mayor Anthony “Tony” Vauss’ Team Irvington Strong. Both slates run at the non-partisan municipal level.
John F. Brown is the fourth candidate, looking to fill a one-year unexpired term.
The township’s OEM Coordinator and Deputy Public Safety Director was also appointed July 7 after Gene Etchison resigned on June 30. Etchison, a 32-year Newark police officer and former North Ward Council candidate, was elected to the board in 2020.
All four candidates are running on the ballot unopposed. Voters do have the option of writing in a candidate or candidates on their Vote By Mail Ballots or at the voting machine polling booth on or before April 19.
IBOE’s recently-recommended 2022-23 School Year Budget calls for a $176,155,359 outlay. Property owners are being asked to pay $17,459,529 in school taxes – an outlay unchanged from last year.
Irvington and Newark, by virtue of still holding their school board elections on the third Tuesday in April, offer their annual school budgets for voter approval via public question referenda.
Nine “Local Talk” public school districts, by moving their April elections to the November General Election ballot, lost the budget public question option. Montclair Public Schools are in the midst of becoming the 10th district.
The mayor-appointed East Orange and the two-town South Orange-Maplewood school districts used Boards of School Estimate to draft their budgets.
Irvington and Newark’s BOE would create BSE panels should their respective voters reject one or both budget questions. Those panels have a month to draw up a revised budget for Essex County Superintendent of Schools and N.J. Department of Education approval.
NEWARK voters have seven candidates to fill three board seats. Those seven fall into a three-candidate slate against four independents.
Incumbents Daniel Gonzalez and A’Dorian Murray-Thomas and newcomer Crystal D. Williams are running on the Moving Newark Schools Forward team.
Moving Newark Schools Forward, like in Irvington, is the annual BOE version of Mayor Ras Baraka’s quadrennial Moving Newark Forward slate. A majority of participating registered city voters have swept in MNSF slates since it was formed as a fusion team from Newark Children First and For Our Kids in 2018.
Gonzalez – who was appointed to complete the late Octavio “Tave” Padilla’s unexpired term in 2019 and won last year’s special election – is seeking his first elected three-year term. The former City of Newark and current Joint Meeting of Essex and Union Counties Finance Director had returned to his native city from Ridgewood in 2008.
Murray-Thomas, a native who is the Morristown-Beard School’s equity and inclusion deputy director, is seeking her second full term. She founded SHE Wins, Inc., which prepares girls for college and careers.
Murray-Thomas, who received the highest number of individual votes in 2019, declined a board of directors seat over the winter that was offered by the KIPP Foundation. There were those who said that a sitting NPS board member should not accept a seat on the nation’s largest charter school network.
Williams is a 25-year Verizon network technician and a Chad Science Academy graduate who put most of her seven children through NPS.
Williams may succeed the outgoing Shayvonne Anderson. The one-term board member has decided to focus on launching her Healing Her non-profit arm.
Maggie Freeman is alphabetically first among the independent challengers, The Marketing Director of the Weequahic Park Sports Authority last ran in 2019.
Allison K. James-Frison (Make Allison Your Only Choice) is the founder of Girls; Live, Laugh, Love, Inc. The social worker and Central High School graduate is making her first NBOE run.
Thomas Luna may be best known in NPS circles as Newark for Educational Equity and Diversity NJ, a community group that advocated for revised Newark Board of Education vacancy bylaws. He is an Eighth Grade mathematics teacher at KIPP’s RISE Academy.
Phillip Wilson is an Essex County “Newark Tech” School of Technology graduate who applied his education as a 20-year auto collision technician and an automotive teacher at several Essex and Union county schools. The father of five had run in 2020 and 21.
Although the four challengers are running independently as of press time, “Local Talk” has seen at least one case of two such candidates forming a late joint platform.
NPS officials, like their Irvington colleagues, are preparing to submit their 2022-23 budget to Essex County Clerk Chris Durkin for ballot placement.
The proposed budget, as passed by NBOE in their annual special meeting on March 25, is $1,227,000,000 – or $1.227 billion – with a $1,212,200 general fund balance. The general fund and overall figures include a $120 million, or 13 percent, increase in state aid.
The bulk of NPS’ general fund, like that of Irvington and 31 other needy/”Abbott” school districts, is drawn from state and federal aid. This has been the case since the New Jersey State Supreme Court’s “thorough and efficient education” rulings from the “Abbott vs. Burke” case of the 1970s.
Newark’s property taxpayers are being asked to pay a $14.8 million “municipal share.” That payment has actually slightly declined from last year.
The owner of a house with an average assessed value of $175,000 is being asked to pay $1,951.60 for 2022-23. It is $8.75 less than the $1,960.35 asked for in 2021-22.
The proposed budget includes NPS, as a sending district, paying charter schools $342 million. The receiving charter school gets 90 percent of a student’s tuition when he or she enrolls with them. That 90 percent gets returned to NPS, however, should the student return to the public district before Nov. 15.
This year’s amount is $42 million more than last school year.
The proposed budget includes a $26 million increase in salaries. The boost allows NPS to hire 222 more people, including 121 more teachers.
The budget, should it pass voters’ muster, includes repairing East Side High School’s windows and renovating University High School’s gymnasium as part of its capital spending plan.
Vote By Mail Ballots may be sent in now through 8 p.m. April 19. April 11 is the last date to ask for a VBMB by mail or make name or address changes with the county clerk’s office.
There will be a selected number of physical voting machine polling stations open early and/or 6 a.m.-8 p.m. April 19.
Consult essexclerk.com, essexboardofelections.org and/or Irvington or Newark municipal or public schools’ clerks for details.
