The South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education election takes place on Tuesday, November 7, 2023. Three of nine seats are up for election. Three candidates filed to run by the July deadline and appear on the ballot: Shayna Sackett-Gable, Liz Callahan and Will Meyer. Two candidates, Jeff Bennett and Anthony Mazzocchi, announced a write-in campaign on October 7. Village Green is posting letters of support for all candidates: Deadline for submission is October 31 at 5 p.m. Read our guidelines here. Read all our election coverage here.
To the Village Green:
I’m writing to express my strong support for Tony Mazzocchi in his candidacy for the Board of Education.
Tony and his running mate, Jeff Bennett, share many things with the other candidates running for Board membership. The five candidates are clearly all dedicated citizens and have voiced fairly similar opinions on a number of topics, including deleveling, transparency and communication, transportation, and special education. Voters may well wonder how to choose among them.
Here are some compelling reasons to vote for Tony. First, like Jeff, he has been a Board member in the recent past, and his deep sense of commitment is such that he wants to do it again, knowing full well the many late-night meetings and difficult discussions it entails. Second, he worked for the district as Supervisor of Fine and Performing Arts (2010-2013), so he has a valuable insider’s perspective on the school system. In addition, since 2020 he has been the Director of the Cali School of Music at Montclair State University, where he experiences the multi-dimensional challenges of a large education system with a wide variety of stakeholders.
Most important, I believe, is that Tony knows the unique educational value of the arts, and he has dedicated his life and career to that vision. There’s a growing body of evidence showing that schools prioritizing arts education are likely to have better academic outcomes, better student mental health, and greater educational equity. Yet, somehow, this crucial factor has been almost completely missing from our district’s ongoing conversations about improving our schools.
SOMA residents love to think of our community as artistically special. We are home to throngs of professional artists and community artists, and our arts-based reputation forms a big part of our cultural identity. Why, then, don’t we make sure that our schools are models of arts-rich education for all students?
To be clear: our district’s arts teachers are amazing. They’re geniuses of creative, empathic teaching. But there are too few of them. They are overworked and underpaid. For most students, the amount of school time spent in arts learning is meager.
There’s no doubt that our school system has major academic challenges, especially in the areas of curriculum inequity, test score disparity, and insufficient support for special education. What I am proposing is that a district-wide arts-rich, arts-intensive school environment should be part of our plans to address these challenges. Arts in schools aren’t a nice but non-essential frill. They can have real, measurable impact on academic and socio-emotional outcomes.
I believe that among the candidates for Board membership, Tony has the fullest understanding of this, and could help to lead in developing a vision of how a more robust arts presence in our schools can be part of the solution to some of the district’s most pressing problems.
Sincerely,
Tricia Tunstall, Maplewood
Music educator and author
