Seven candidates have filed this year to run for three seats on the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education. Village Green has invited each candidate to submit a profile. The following profile is from Jeff Bennett. Read more Village Green election coverage here.
Jeff Bennett
Neighbors,
I’m running for the Board of Education with Bimal Kapadia and Deirdre Brown to be a champion of inclusive excellence, where we help make our Board of Ed one that strives to raise the floor and eliminate the ceiling. I want our kids to attend a district with exciting, challenging classes and stellar arts & music, but which also gets basic things right, from all-weather sports fields, to coherent high school schedules, to reliable bussing, to stress-free earlycare/aftercare registration.
Since I’ve run for the BOE before, some of you may already know about my background, but in case not, here goes: I’ve lived here for 18 years and was on the Board of Education previously, from 2012-15, when I was in my early 30s. My board service took place after I had been a public school teacher, but not yet become a father. Flash forward twelve years to 2024 and now I have two daughters and one son in the public schools, in Kindergarten, Third Grade, and Sixth Grade, and my kids have attended SOMS, Marshall, Bolden, and public PreK. Professionally I’m a librarian, and both my wife and I work in-person. As a potential board member for 2025-27, I can’t wait to apply the knowledge of education law, finance, and the SOMSD’s own institutional history I built in my first term and in subsequent years to the SOMSD of today.
In my first term on the board I worked across the education landscape, including helping the pass the Access & Equity policy, capital bonding for school renovation and expansion, a G&T Strategy, allowing homeschoolers to play sports at CHS, a superintendent search, and efforts to improve reading instruction, for both general ed and special education students.
The early 2010s were a bad time budgetarily for the SOMSD, and I became passionately concerned in how unfair the distribution of state aid was to our community and raised awareness of how unjustly our district was treated. After my board service I was research director of a grassroots group that successfully fought to have NJ’s state aid law changed in 2018.
Although I was young when I was on the BOE the first time, I always understood how vital stability is. I did not agree with Superintendent Brian Osborne on every topic, nor think he was administratively flawless, but I thought he was a good superintendent overall and voted to renew his contract.
I never acted to have a principal or other staff member non-renewed. What happened with Frank Sanchez is not something I would have ever done in my time on the board, and I was shocked at the legal threat he faced.
Every board candidate, and sitting member, has something unique about him or her. One of my unique qualities is how much I dive into educational data and research and then share that information with the public via online school forums, specifically the SOMA Cares about Schools Facebook page. Over the last few years, I’ve shared information on topics like enrollment, how the III functioned in practice, the BOE’s secretly-passed prohibition on III transfers, SOMSD enrollment loss, shifts in kindergarten size, the SOMSD’s budget, and a lot of information about the SOMSD’s bus system, including that PreK bussing is extremely expensive in per student terms and is an area where we can save a large amount of money.
As a board member starting in 2025 I pledge to continue to be accessible to the public and to transparently and proactively share as much information as I can. I would advocate for the Board and Administration to gather vital information so that our policies can constantly improve. This would include having a more robust survey of Intentional Integration Initiative families closely monitoring the academic results of the first III cohorts when they become available. For teachers, I would like to know how they feel about some of the new approaches we are taking around student discipline, particularly regarding Columbia High School and scheduling in grades 6-12.
Our Board of Education certainly has its work cut out for it. There are overarching, long-term issues, starting with the academic outcome gap, a pervasive lack of trust, and low teacher morale. The Board’s “north star” decision-making orientation has to be about how to remedy those issues.
Then there are new, emergent problems where the Board of Education and Superintendent have more direct control and which are sometimes the result of the Board’s own policies, like a structurally unsound budget that has allowed departments like special education, the arts & music, athletics, and guidance to wither. We have a non-collaborative integration process which assigns families randomly to their neighborhood school or some other school, without even purporting to determine family need.
Going into 2025 I have worries about the district’s budget, since our state aid increases from here on should be smaller and we must give teachers a solid raise. Facing 2024-25’s budget crisis, the Board cannot be passive and just wait for the superintendent to announce cuts. Preventing the 2025-26, 2026-27, 2027-28 etc budget crises starts now, and I propose to do that by using our expanded facilities to bring students with special needs, Interdistrict Choice students, and PreK students into our schools, to reduce spending on PreK bussing, and by fighting for state aid law that is fair to districts that lack commercial property.
To these problems and more, I offer solutions from years of following the board and closely studying school finance, curriculum, our transportation system and other districts’ integration plans. If elected, I know that I’m part of a nine person team that works in partnership with the superintendent. I’m ready – along with my running mates Deirdre and Bimal – to hit the ground running to make this the best district it can be.
To find out more about our campaign, please visit our website at https://www.brownbennettkapadia.com/
