Continuity is the theme in the New Hyde Park-Garden City Park school board election, which features three uncontested races.
Incumbents Patricia Rudd and Alan Cooper are running to keep their seats. Former board member Frank Miranda is running for the seat vacated by Annette Giarratani last year due to illness.
Rudd has served on the board for 12 years and said she was ready to step down, but felt a responsibility to run for another term.
“I thought it was enough. But because of the difficult times right now, I thought I should stay another three years,” Rudd said. “Things are going to be changing in education.”
She said she is concerned that people seem to be focusing too much on test statistics rather than the fundamentals effective teaching.
“They talk about test scores being better in other countries. I think we should get away from the testing and back to the basics,” Rudd said.
She said she fears the prospect of a system becoming increasingly privatized, and said she opposes the concept some school districts – notably Herricks – are considering to require parents to pay a fee for their children to participate in extra-curricular activities, including athletics.
“People are barely holding onto their homes right now. There are many homes up for sale in our district,” Rudd said.
Rudd was school board president from 2005 to 2009, and was a member of the Sewanhaka School District from 2003 to 2008. She has also been a member of the Nassau-Suffolk School Boards in 2008 and serves the New York State School Board’s Association as a delegate to an annual education lobbying conference in Washington, D.C.
Cooper is running for his second three-year term on the board.
“I feel that I have made a significant difference over the past three years but my work is far from complete,” Cooper said when he announced plans to run again.
Calling the 2.97 percent increase to $33.5 million in its proposed budget “historic,” but added, “there are tough times ahead.”
Cooper is vice president for the Center for Learning and Innovation at the North Shore-LIJ Health System and serves as the assistant dean for knowledge management and associate professor of science education at the Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine at Hofstra University.
Cooper is also a 29-year member of the Garden City Park Fire Department, where he served 12 years as Water/Fire Commissioner. He is also a board member for the Merillon Athletic Association, a Merillon baseball coach and a New Hyde Park Wildcats soccer coach.
Miranda could not be reached for comment on his candidacy
The race for the lone contested seat on the Herricks School Board pits two high-profile civic activists Jonai Singh and Jim Gounaris against each other.
Singh, co-president of the Herricks Council of the PTAs, entered the race last month expecting to run unopposed for the seat being vacated by Williston Park Mayor Paul Ehrbar. Gounaris, a member of the Herricks Community Center Advisory Board, said he decided he should try to get more directly involved in school board business.
Ehrbar decided to not run because of scheduling conflicts between his mayoral and school board duties. He encouraged Singh to run and endorsed her as an “independent voice” the school district needed.
Singh, who is past president of the Herricks Indo-US Community, a non-profit Indian American organization, is also an informal liaison between the PTA and the Herricks Community Center seniors group. She has a reputation as a consensus-builder in the district.
She’s running on a ticket with board president Christine Turner, who has 21 years of experience on the school board.
Both Singh and Gounaris have children attending district schools and both are vocal participants at school board meetings. Gounaris was particularly vocal during the recent school budget hearings as he sharply criticized the Herricks Teachers Association for not taking a wage freeze next year in light of the current state fiscal crisis.
