Three Port Washington residents who launched communitywide efforts last summer to press for schools to open for in-person instruction five days a week are running for three trustee positions on the district’s Board of Education.
Nearly 10 months ago, Adam Smith, Adam Block and Justin Renna launched a campaign, called Five Days of Port, to encourage the Port Washington school district to re-open to offer in-person instruction for students for a full week. The district ultimately brought back full-time instruction for kindergarten through fifth grade in October after hearing pleas from a 1,000-person Facebook group, a petition with 1,200 signatures and a 250-person rally in August.
Because of the event, Smith said, people reached out to the three and encouraged them to run for the three seats on the board. The three are among seven candidates, including three incumbents, running in the election on Tuesday, May 18.
“We’ve all had a lot of people reaching out to us over the last 16 months or so, encouraging us to run,” Smith said in an interview with Blank Slate Media.
Smith runs strategic and financial planning, as well as day-to-day operations, of a New York-based real estate investment and development firm. He is also the emergency preparedness chair and serves on the board of trustees for a local religious institution and preschool. Smith and his wife, Jenny, live in Port Washington North and their three children go to district schools.
Block, a graduate of Schreiber High School, is a professor of public health at New York Medical College. He received a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from Amherst College and a Ph.D. in health policy with a concentration in economics from Harvard University. Over the course of his career, he has worked as an economist for the U.S. Congress and wrote regulations for the Department of Health and Human Services.
Block also started the company, Port Skis, a ski equipment rental service based in the area, and is treasurer of Salem Elementary School’s Home School Association. Block, his wife, and their three children all reside in the area, with all three of his children being active students in the school district.
Renna is a professional ventilation expert employed by an international HVAC equipment manufacturer and an athletics coach at the secondary and elementary levels, with sports ranging from football and baseball to track and others. He also serves on the board of directors for a local youth sports organization and lives with his wife, Randie, and their two children in Manorhaven.
While the three touted the efforts of the Five Days for Port as a main catalyst for the district ultimately opening up for in-person instruction, the slate of three incumbents, board President Nora Johnson, Vice President Elizabeth Weisburd and Trustee Larry Greenstein, said the group’s efforts actually hindered progress.
“We had an equal number of families asking us to please, please, please go hybrid, because they didn’t want their kids in full time,” the incumbents said in an interview with Blank Slate Media. “There were also many parents who wrote to us, ‘don’t open at all, we want remote school.’ So there were clearly three different groups that understandably, had three different positions on what the school should look like.”
The slate of Smith, Block, and Renna said the current board lacks transparency to the public and is not implementing what parents in the district would consider “mainstream education.” The challengers said they would bring a more modern and effective method of coordinating district programs and education.
“The Vision and Mission that they’re talking about, I think is outside of what most parents would consider mainstream education,” Block said. “They’re talking about doing Vision and Mission work that is going to fundamentally change the way that our kids are educated and change the curriculums.”
“The Vision and Mission work is not only mainstream thinking in education but in corporate America as well,” the incumbents responded. “Having a community-wide committee made up of a broad representation of stakeholders who are identifying our local priorities and core values, and looking at everything we do for our children pre-K through 12 through that lens is what every quality district in the world is doing.”
Block and the rest of the challengers outlined a few ways where they can implement more transparency in the school district. While the incumbents claim that there is not a transparency problem and cite a legal obligation to keep a few things out of the public light, the challengers mentioned that holding monthly Zoom or in-person “office hours” sessions with the public would prove beneficial for all stakeholders.
“Justin, Adam and I, (and we’ll welcome any other members of the board that want to do this is), will have office hours once a month, where we sit outside or have a Zoom meeting, and you can come and talk to us about your issues,” Block said. “We want to listen to you.”
The challengers touted the work done by Superintendent Michael Hynes and how the schools in the district function but said the community stakeholders are not getting a “bang for the buck.” The slate said the current board meetings run quickly and pass through agenda items without doing a deep dive into telling residents what they are paying for.
“With the dollars, we’re spending, are we getting the best bang for our buck? You don’t see that conversation happening at the current board meetings,” Smith said. “In fact, if you watch these board meetings, it’s very high level, it’s a lot of approving agenda items, but you don’t ever see any talk about what metrics, what key performance indicators are we tying our district to.”
“Since the challengers announced their candidacies, at their request, board members have spent hours explaining the process to them,” the incumbents responded. “If they had been paying attention to school board meetings and budget meetings they would know that ‘bang for the buck’ is discussed often in building the budget as is how we are able to deliver a quality education within the budgetary constraints we face.”
Toward the end of the interview, the slate of challengers clarified some points they believe have been misconstrued in terms of their comments about the board and why they are running. Renna related the slate’s campaign for the board as a turnover for a coaching and staff change for college sports teams.
“We’re not saying that the current board is awful, but we’re definitely something different,” Renna said. “When things aren’t up to standards with a team, it is typically the coaching staff that is replaced. They hire a new coach and bring in new coordinators.”
“Running for the board is not something that any of us planned,” Smith said. “We’re just three parents who are highly invested in our school district.”
“I don’t think the board reflects the community at large, and our perspective, which I know is at least 1,000 people, is not reflected at all on the board,” Block said. “So we’re running because we’ve been ignored for a very long time.”
Those in the district who are registered to vote for the three trustee positions and $167 million budget can go to the in-person polling location, in the all-purpose room of the Flower Hill section of the Carrie Palmer Weber Middle School, located at 52 Campus Drive in Port Washington, from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. on May 18.
