BOE Candidates: A Closer Look at This Week’s Town Hall Forum

Four of the six candidates for the Fort Lee Board of Education turned up at the Fort Lee Public Library Tuesday for another candidates forum—this one hosted by the United Republican Club of Fort Lee.

Helen Yoon, Tracy Mattei, Paul Umrichin and incumbent Joseph Surace provided brief summaries of their platforms and qualifications, followed by a Q&A with the audience in what was described as a town hall-style event moderated by Martha Cohen.

Incumbents Michele Ramirez-Stux and Peter Suh did not attend the forum, but the four who did mainly reiterated—or in some cases clarified—their positions on a range of issues and fielded questions from club members and others, many of which had been asked at recent such events in one form or another.

Mattei, who has one child in the Fort Lee school system already and another starting in September, said she decided to run for the board “primarily to represent the parents with children in the school system.”

“There’s a lot of great people on the board,” Mattei said. “But it’s definitely missing parents.”

Mattei, an educator by trade who worked in sales for many years, said “keeping the focus on education” is very important to her, and that “we need to re-focus and get back to the business of education.”

She said a lack of a curriculum in the elementary schools has been “gnawing at” her and that another component of her platform is community outreach.

“We have a lot of wonderful things going on in Fort Lee in the school system, and they’re not being promoted, and they’re not being celebrated in the greater community,” Mattei said. “And I think that’s really important for the taxpayers of Fort Lee to understand what they’re paying for [and] what they’re giving to our children beyond the brick and mortar that they see.”

In her closing remarks, which had to be kept extremely brief for all the candidates because the library was about to close, Mattei said, “I believe in education first and being forthright with the public.”

Surace—the only incumbent who attended the forum—reminded the audience that he’s a lifelong resident of Fort Lee, saying “Fort Lee is in my blood.”

Surace, who remains active in the community in various ways beyond the school district, is finishing up his seventh year on the board. He highlighted his more than 30 years of involvement with youth football, adding that that alone should “prove that I love children in Fort Lee, and I love my community.”

“I think I have a feel for what goes on as far as the numbers,” said the licensed public accountant, who also pointed out that he believes he’s the only Republican in Fort Lee who currently holds either an elected or an appointed seat.

“But that doesn’t mean that’s why you’ve got to vote for me,” Surace told the gathering of mostly Republicans. “You’ve got to vote for me because you think I’m effective and that I can do a good job for the children of Fort Lee.”

Yoon, who moved to Fort Lee with her family in 1980 and attended School No. 3 before moving to Demarest and then back to Fort Lee in 1994, said, “I’m here today because I have a vested interest in the community. I’m a product of the Fort Lee school system, and I also plan to raise a family here one day.”

Yoon said it was “the twice-failed referendum” that inspired her to run for a seat on the board.

“I’ve spoken to leaders and members of the community, and there’s a common denominator in all of these discussions,” she said. “The common concern is this: that the referendum was a disaster and the school board failed us. We really needed this referendum, and we really needed the long-overdue improvements to our school infrastructure. But we also needed to be realistic in this economic climate.”

By way of summary, Yoon said, “I hope that we can be a more financially responsible, efficient and a more unified community.”

Umrichin, who moved to Fort Lee two years ago to live with his wife, a lifelong resident of Fort Lee herself, emphasized his personal experiences with his son, who previously required  an Individualized Education Program, or IEP, but was mainstreamed when he moved to Fort Lee after some very hard work. Umrichin said he’s dedicated himself to his son’s education, “making sure that he’s able to achieve his goals, and making sure that everything he has for his education is found in the school district.”

“I want to give that same dedication that I gave my son to the children of Fort Lee,” Umrichin said. “For the past 19 years that I can see on paper, we’ve been overcrowded. This needs to be fixed. There needs to be alternatives that the public needs to be involved in. I believe when they made the referendums, they had the right ideas in mind. But when they presented it to the public, there wasn’t enough interest to get that passed, because the public was not involved in the decisions. I want to bring the public more in touch with the Board of Education.”

By way of a necessarily brief conclusion, Umrichin said, “I have my finger on the pulse of the parents and the students. I’m hoping that as a parent I can bring that to the Board of Education.”

Selected questions and how the four candidates answered:

The current budget uses the entire reserve fund. Do you feel this is wise? Or, if you don’t, what would you have done?

“Unfortunately, given the two percent cap passed by [the state], I feel it was necessary, but it puts a very big burden on us now, so we don’t have anything to fall back on,” Umrichin began. “Going forward, it’s as if you’ve lost your job. You have money in the bank, and you have to use it to pay your bills. But eventually it’s going to run out, and we’ve run out.”

Next up was Surace, who said, “We had to go to the reserve account or we had to cut more services to our children. The Board of Education really only controls 10 percent of the budget. [The rest] are all fixed costs that we have no control over … We’ve used the reserves, but we’ve used them for good reason.”

Mattei and Yoon declined to answer this question

What ideas that you haven’t seen with the board would you like to see implemented?

Mattei said there are a lot of things that can be done to include Fort Lee’s various and diverse groups, saying the first thing she’d like to do is “incorporate more cultural aspects into the curriculum and bring some of the communities together,” citing as an example, “Children’s Day,” which is celebrated in some Asian cultures.

She also said she would like to see “a cross section of Fort Lee citizens to come in and tell us what they thought about the referendum and what we need to do with it.”

Umrichin emphasized the importance of using technology and the need to stream board meetings. He also said he’d like to see a feedback forum implemented that goes beyond what’s currently available at board meetings—perhaps, he said, on the BOE’s website or simply board members’ getting out into the public more.

“If everybody gets involved, everybody has a stake in what happens,” Umrichin said. “Public involvement is crucial.”

Yoon agreed with Umrichin in that getting the community involved is paramount and using technology and streaming meetings is one way to do that.

Surace argued that all Fort Lee Board of Education meetings are open to the public, and anyone from the public can speak on any subject.

“It’s a little bit unfair to say that people come to our meetings and we don’t let them speak,” Surace said. “There are more people here tonight than ever appear at Board of Education meetings. What does that tell you? If you have an interest, we’re there every other Monday night. Come.”

How do you plan to make the board more fiscally responsible?

Surace emphasized his belief that board has in fact been fiscally responsible pointing to its having saved $1 million.

Holding up a water bottle, Surace said, “There’s only so much water you can fit in this bottle, and that’s what we’ve been able to do under a really tough situation. When you have restrictions in the budget, you cannot do everything you want to do. You have to make a decision.”

Giving credit to the board for “doing a lot to save a lot of money,” such as bringing special needs students back into the school system, converting office space into classroom space and “incorporating bus schedules with other towns,” Umrichin said, “It’s ideas like that that are going to keep us going, creative ideas working with other towns.”

Umrichin also said it is possible to re-use textbooks for a period if necessary, because much of the information in subjects such as Math and Science doesn’t change much from year-to-year.

Mattei said the school district was forced to bring the special needs kids back into the district, “and although we did it, I wonder how much the decision that was made was reactive or proactive. We really should have brought them back sooner, saving us millions upon millions of dollars, but we didn’t do that.”

She also said methodologies and curriculums are “ever-changing.”

“They need to be responsive to our community,” she said. “They need to be responsive to our students. And in Fort Lee, we have a high percentage of English as a second language, we have a standard 10 percent special needs and we have wonderful different aspects of cultures, and the curriculum needs to reflect that.”

Yoon said she believes the board needs to be placed under more scrutiny and exercise more financial responsibility.

“We really need to know what our priorities are and have a justification for those needs,” she said.

[With the exception of] special needs children, do you feel that anyone serving on the board must keep their children in our public schools, and if so, do you promise to keep your children in our public schools during your entire term?

Mattei was unequivocal in her answer, though she did say religious schools might be an exception.

“My children will remain in Fort Lee public schools,” she said. “Sitting board members should have their children in the public schools. Sending them to an alternate private school I think cries out that they don’t trust the public school system. I think we have too many members on the board who are sending their children to private schools.”

Yoon, who doesn’t yet have children, said she “would not encourage” board members to send their children to private schools, and that if she had children, she would keep them in the Fort Lee public school system.

Umrichin said he currently has children in sixth, seventh and eighth grade, “and they aren’t leaving the school system any time soon.”

But he had a slightly different take on the issue.

“I don’t think that you do need to be a parent to be on the school board,” he said. “[But] You do get a better feel for what goes on in the school district. I would never, ever try and oust someone because they didn’t. That’s their personal choice.”

Surace doesn’t have school-age children anymore, but he said both of his children were educated in the Fort Lee school system.

This year’s budget has no director of curriculum. Do you think this was a good decision (as opposed to having an assistant superintendent)?

Yoon said she thinks both positions are important, but that a curriculum director has “a more specialized role” and that it’s a “crucial” one.

Umrichin said “doing the curriculum” should be “at least 50 percent” of the assistant superintendent’s job.

“Without a director of curriculum, [the assistant superintendent] needs to work closely with the principals in the schools to make sure that it’s unified,” Umrichin said.

Mattei said she was a proponent of a curriculum director “until I found out that she wasn’t writing the curriculum.”

“Now I don’t think it’s necessary,” she said. “The assistant superintendent’s position can be expanded to include or supervise the curriculum development. The principals … can really be assets. It’s a huge job.”

Surace argued that in trying to save the district money, “we’re not neglecting the curriculum.”

“The duties of the curriculum director are being re-assigned throughout upper management,” he explained. “We have consolidated our efforts, where hopefully we’re going to get more with less and hopefully eliminate the $130,000 salary plus another $25,000 for benefits … [Curriculum development] is not going to die. It’s just going to get done by other people in other ways. We need to do more with less.”

And finally, it was Surace who may have said it best, when his concluding remarks—rushed as they were—included the following:

“I encourage everybody on election day to go out and vote, exercise your right as an American citizen … and good luck to everybody in this room.

Election day is April 27, when Fort Lee voters will go to the polls to elect three members to the Fort Lee Board of Education and vote yea or nay on the school budget. Polls are open from 2 to 9 p.m. that Wednesday.