BY ROSE WELDON AND ROBERT PELAEZ
Three of the four school districts serving the Roslyn area have new faces seeking board of education seats in the elections on Tuesday, May 18.
ROSLYN
Four candidates, three of them incumbents, will compete for three seats on the Roslyn Board of Education.
Incumbent Trustees David Seinfeld, David Dubner and Michael Levine are up for re-election, and resident Ronald Gerber submitted a challenger petition.
Seinfeld, one of the board’s longest-serving trustees and a veteran in educational services, was first elected in 2006. Dubner, an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, was appointed to the Board of Education in 2013 following the resignation of Dani Kline and was elected to fill the remainder of her term, and has since been re-elected once. Attorney Levine was elected in 2018 after former Trustee Adam Haber chose not to run for another term.
Gerber, a newcomer to the school board race, is the founder and CEO of security software company AngelBeat.
The vote will take place at Roslyn High School from 7 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.
NORTH SHORE SCHOOLS
School board Vice President Timothy Madden and Trustee Lisa Vizza have not filed petitions for re-election, and four candidates are competing to become the newest additions to the North Shore school district’s Board of Education.
Lisa Colacioppo, who previously served on the district’s Social-Emotional Learning Action Planning Committee; Maria Mosca, a parent active in the district who has given lessons on weather patterns to students; Paul Puskuldjian, COO of trading software company Kinetix Trading Solutions; and engineer Anthony Stanco, who was on the ballot last year, are all running for the two positions.
Residents can vote in the North Shore High School gym in Sea Cliff from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.
MINEOLA
Middle school teacher Stacey DeCillis will run unopposed for the seat on the Mineola Board of Education held by President Christine Napolitano, who announced last month she will not seek re-election.
Trustee Brian Widman, a Roslyn Heights resident, is also running unopposed for his third term on the board.
Napolitano endorsed the candidacy of DeCillis, an eighth-grade social studies teacher at Garden City Middle School. DeCillis said on Facebook that her goal is to prioritize students throughout the district.
“My goal is to ensure this district continues to provide high-quality education to all of our district’s children and continues to create a generation of lifelong learners,” she said in a statement. “As a parent to 3 school aged children and an educator myself, I am hopeful to be a valuable member to this team.”
Napolitano, a Williston Park resident for almost 30 years, cited giving more attention to her “growing family and husband” as a reason to step down and said she informed district Superintendent Michael Nagler of her decision in January.
“I announced today that after 12 years of serving on Mineola’s BOE, I will not be seeking re-election for a fifth term,” Napolitano said in a tweet. “I will never be able to say thank you enough to my community for letting me share in this amazing journey. It has been the honor of my life.”
The district’s election will take place from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Voting will occur at the Jackson Avenue School at 300 Jackson Ave. in Mineola and the Meadow Drive School at 25 Meadow Drive in Albertson.
HERRICKS
Herricks Board of Education Trustees Brian Hassan and Nancy Feinstein are running unopposed for re-election.
Feinstein, a Roslyn resident, is running for her fourth three-year term on the board. She has three children who have all attended and graduated from Herricks schools.
Hassan, an Albertson resident, is running for his fourth term on the board. He has three children who have graduated from the Herricks schools.
The board unanimously adopted a $122.9 million budget on Tuesday, a $2.33 million or 1.94 percent increase from the 2020-21 budget.
The budget also featured a 1.42 percent increase for the 2021-22 tax levy compared with this year’s, but still remained below the cap of 2.51 percent.
The initially proposed 1.86 percent levy increase was lowered to 1.42 percent as a result of additional state aid. The district’s average levy increase since the cap’s inception in 2012-13 is 1.66 percent.
A total of 75 percent, or $91.6 million, of the budget, is for programming, with 15 percent, or $18.4 million, for capital projects, and the remaining 10 percent, or $12.8 million, made up of administrative costs.
The vote for the board and the budget will take place from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. at the Herricks Community Center gymnasium.
