The South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education election takes place on Tuesday, November 7, 2023. Three of nine seats come up for election each year. 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 profiles for each candidate. The following profile was submitted by Liz Callahan. Read our 2023 election guidelines here.
Liz Callahan (Photo by Morgan Triska)
Biography
Elizabeth Callahan is a behavioral consultant, lifelong student, proud parent, and active community member of Maplewood.
Born and raised in the great state of New Jersey, Liz is the product of high-quality public school education. She completed her bachelor’s degree at Seton Hall University in Social & Behavioral Sciences with a minor in Social Work, and later received her master’s in Applied Behavior Analysis at Caldwell University. Currently, she is completing a graduate certificate in Social and Emotional Learning and School Climate at Quinnipiac University.
Liz and her family moved to Maplewood in 2018, after nearly a decade in Hoboken with a brief layover in Montclair. Her husband Mike, is the Lead Founding Director at Change Summer, and a member of the American Camp Association. Their oldest son Deaglan is a rising third grader at Tuscan Elementary School, and an aspiring author. While their youngest son, Seamus is an incoming preschooler at Applecore, who one day wants to be a spinosaurus.
Liz has been involved in the Tuscan Elementary School community as a class coordinator since her son Deaglan began in Kindergarten, and next year will be serving as the Parade Coordinator. She is also a member of the SOMA Action Education Committee.
Professionally, Liz has spent the last 18 years in education. She began her career providing 1:1 support as a paraprofessional for preschool aged children with disabilities in a therapeutic school setting. She quickly fell in love with the work, and in this first experience learned that effectively supporting the social-emotional and behavioral growth of students, was critical to their academic success. She went on to accrue extensive experience, providing direct instruction 1:1 and in small groups, supporting transitions to least restrictive environments, co-teaching in special education and inclusion classrooms, providing training to undergraduate and graduate students working with autistic students at a university-based center, helping to found a clinic for students with disabilities, and then moving into regional school leadership.
In this leadership role as the Director of Clinical Services Liz was a member of a multidisciplinary special education and student support team that worked across 14 schools in neighboring Newark, NJ. Liz was responsible for hiring, managing and providing clinical support and direction to her team, school leaders, and school-based teams. She created policies, procedures, and work flows to facilitate student and educator success, disseminated best practices through ongoing professional development, and built relationships with school leaders and school-based teams to develop a more consistent response to intervention via protocols, procedures, and practices for supporting and responding to the social emotional and behavioral needs of students. In this role Liz also played an integral role in managing complex cases, training paraprofessionals, assisted in establishing consistency across self-contained classrooms, introduced a grief support group via Good Grief, ran virtual parent education groups during COVID, and was engaged in COVID related reopening planning and support.
Currently, she is a member of a premier group practice that provides high-quality behavioral and cognitive therapies, consultation, and training using evidence-based approaches tailored to the unique needs of the individual, organization, and setting with a focus on sensitive, and compassionate delivery. In this role Liz centers that compassionate care and trauma informed practices, and prioritizes building strong relationships with teams and students. She specializes in working collaboratively with schools to build capacity and develop systems that integrate best practices in behavior analysis and social-emotional learning to build teachers’ toolkits in classroom management by coaching on equitable and inclusive practices, developing safe and practical interventions to address and prevent interfering behavior, improving school culture and climate, and addressing disproportionality in special education.
In addition to her work in schools, Liz also provides professional development, continuing education and presents at local conferences. Then, when school’s out for the summer, you can find her and her family at camp. As a kid, Liz attended both day and sleep away camp, and later served as a camp counselor for 10-years at Camp Better Days, a camp that served kids who lost a parent or loved one on September 11, 2001. Next, as her husband founded his own camp, Camp Uncommon, she created surveys to evaluate the experience of stakeholders, and now provides consultation and professional development on supporting and responding to the social, emotional and behavioral needs of campers to its parent company Change Summer. She and her family spend the summer together at Camp Uncommon, now in its 8th year providing an enriching summer camp experience for campers from under-resourced communities.
Liz is excited at the opportunity to join the Board of Education where she would be able leverage her love of schools, her passion for supporting educators, families and students, her vast educational expertise and experience, and collaborative, relationship-based leadership skills to celebrate our successes as a district, and provide a steady, solutions oriented approach to tackle our challenges. She will offer a unique lens to ensuring we provide a comprehensive, nurturing educational environment that meets the needs of all students to promote the best possible academic outcomes.
Platform (with Shayna Sackett-Gable and Will Meyer)
We’re running for the Board of Education because we love our school system and we want to see it meet its greatest potential for all our kids. And right now, the board and district are falling short of that mark.
For instance:
- Despite decades of initiatives, the district fails our Black students at much higher rates than white students – and fails our Latinx, special education, low income, and English language learners as well – and they are now under court scrutiny to finally fix it.
- The towns increased taxes to fund an ambitious new transportation plan, yet the district still can’t manage to get all buses to school on time.
- Our instruction too often falls short, with a curriculum lacking basic phonics and math skills, and a high school culture of low expectations for many students.
- The district is failing many of our students with IEPs, leaving far too many without the services they need and costing the district in legal bills as a result.
- The board and district have deferred school maintenance for decades, leaving our schools in a state of chronic disrepair, even after our massive building plan.
- Our district often leaves families out of the loop, communicating reactively and belatedly, not proactively, and doesn’t engage families in decisions, leading to distrust.
- Our Board of Education is plagued by in-fighting, and families have lost confidence in its ability to make the right decisions.
These big, complicated challenges require community collaboration, data- and expert-informed plans, and thoughtful implementation. It’s vitally important that we have a Board of Education up to the task.
Here are some of our top priorities on day one:
1. Critically Evaluate the Superintendent
Our first task upon taking office must be to get up to speed with the voluminous non-public evaluative material on Dr. Taylor’s performance as superintendent. The new board will likely make the determination on whether to extend Dr. Taylor’s contract beyond June 2023 or seek new leadership for the district, and that determination must be made by March.
We have heard loud and clear the community voices both in support of retaining Dr. Taylor and against. We are all too aware of the district’s struggles over the past four years, and as well the significant and complex challenges in which we are currently entangled.
Within the next three years we must finally comply with Dr. Fergus‘s recommendations, finish the implementation of our Intentional Integration Initiative, and complete building under our Long Range Facilities Plan. Our choice of leadership, and specifically weighing the merits of retaining our superintendent and managing him to success or finding a new superintendent and bringing them up to speed, will have lasting consequences.
We will insist on a fresh evaluation of Dr. Taylor, including a critical review of his performance to date and review of past performance reviews, the strength of the senior leadership team he has assembled, and the soundness of the strategy he has developed to address the priorities listed below. We will also take seriously the opinions of stakeholders including our teachers and the community at large. Our decision will be based on the entirety of these public and non-public materials and our considered judgments, in collaboration with our board colleagues, on the best path forward to lead us through these next critical years.
2. Comply with our Equity Settlement and Integration ASAP
Our renewed settlement agreement with Black Parents Workshop gives us just three years to fix what we haven’t achieved in decades to better serve our Black students and other marginalized and struggling students.
We have no time to waste implementing Dr. Fergus’s 23 mandates, for the sake of our district and our kids. We must focus all our energies on these requirements: strengthening elementary and middle school education; ensuring that Black students can better access and thrive in advanced-level classes; clearly defining and standardizing the process, supports, and protocols for I&RS; and quickly achieving the full and equitable integration of our schools. We commit to ongoing communication and check-ins within this expert-driven process to both quickly satisfy and complete this settlement, and more importantly to end these disparities in our district.
We need to monitor the outcomes of the Intentional Integration Initiative, taking a close look at patterns of demography. We will rely upon and consider carefully the recommendations of Dr. Alves with regard to any contemplated changes to the III, such as opportunities for wait lists or transfers. And, while the III will create equity in our elementary and middle schools by enrollment demographics, we must also ensure that we are providing equitable, top quality instruction in every school and to every student.
3. Fix our Buses and District Operations
It’s one thing when a school bus is late on the first day of school, or perhaps even the first week. What we have been experiencing is something altogether different. Our bus companies’ chronic failures to get students to school on time is unacceptable and is a poor use of our tax dollars. We feel this massive new investment in transportation should have included GPS tracking and logging, direct district communication with bus drivers, and prompt, coordinated, and clear updates to parents.
Should these delays persist into the beginning of our term, we will want to immediately evaluate whether our business office has sufficient staffing and expertise to manage this complex operation, and ascertain what additional resources are needed in the short term to resolve these immediate issues.
Once buses are running on time, we must have a comprehensive post-mortem review to understand where the process fell short and take steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again, including evaluation of a different vendor model, a review of our business office structure, and an understanding of whether this transportation plan was adequately funded to meet its stated goals. District operations like these are crucial to the effectiveness of our school system and must be given top priority and ongoing, careful oversight by the Board.
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We know from the countless communities around the nation that have been impacted by violence in schools that our district has an obligation to protect our student body, but we also know the negative effect drills can have on our kids. We are encouraged by the progressive policies our district has in place for student and family notification and avoiding “realistic” event simulations in drills, and will continue to evaluate our policies and seek best practices within the bounds of legal mandates.
We are concerned about continuing reports of unauthorized students in the high school and will work closely with the administration to find the appropriate balance of security without negative impact on school climate and culture.
We also want to ensure a clear and prompt budgeting process so that a window into the district’s finances is provided promptly and is readily available and understandable to the public. We support bringing back budget cost-center views and headcount charts to have better visibility into district operations and where each dollar is being spent.
4. Ensure Excellent Teaching for All
Educating our children requires great teachers and a strong, evidence-based, and culturally-responsive curriculum. We commit to investing in our excellent teachers with ongoing support and professional development that builds on our existing strengths to benefit our entire faculty, and a recruitment program that prioritizes hiring high quality staff from diverse backgrounds that reflect and represent our student body. We want all classrooms to have rigorous teaching and learning, by setting high expectations, using materials that engage students’ intellect and curiosity, and providing differentiated instruction to make lessons accessible to every student.
We are cautiously optimistic about the district’s updated math and ELA curricula in our elementary schools, hopeful they are able to address shortcomings and implement best practices in teaching. We will closely review and act on performance data to ensure they are working for our students, and promptly insist on changes if not. We want to ensure that our Amistad curriculum and curricula on Asian American and Pacific Islander history, the Holocaust, and LGBTQ history are being provided with fidelity, and pursue instruction on neurodiversity understanding and acceptance.
Our high school’s track record of failing large numbers of students must end. All students must have access to high quality teaching, a challenging curriculum, and teachers that hold them to high expectations. But any initiative to change the high school’s core structure of classes, including tracks and levels, must be approached cautiously, reflect expert guidance and approval, and incorporate the thoughts and concerns of all stakeholders, including teachers, families, and of course students. Rushing a massive change like this could have disastrous consequences and we would only consider a proposal with a sound and well-justified plan for execution.
We are proud of our expansive range of AP courses and favor options to continue to expand these offerings. We strongly support gifted and ambitious students having access to opportunities for accelerated learning.
As we continue to seek improved academic achievement and increased rigor, we must have a functioning program of Intervention & Referral Services. I&RS should be a well defined and standardized system that offers a menu of supportive activities and services for staff who have identified student difficulties or concerns. This will ensure that most students’ needs are immediately addressed in mainstream settings, and the balance are timely referred for additional services if needed. It will also better support teachers by making adequate supports easily available for their struggling students, allowing them to best serve a diverse range of students.
5. Develop School Cultures of Support and Belonging
Our students need safe and supportive learning environments. Creating a culture of belonging and trust is not a “nice to have” feature in a school – it is essential to create confident learners. Only if we provide this climate of support equitably to all our students can we expect to reduce our disparities, not only in learning but also in special education overidentification and school discipline.
To achieve excellent outcomes for students, we must start with building school climates and culture that create a sense of belonging for everyone regardless of race, income, neurodiversity or identity. Specifically, we need to address the Intervention and Referral Services process, social and emotional learning, and restorative practices.
Without a well designed I&RS process to address learning, behavior, social, and health problems, students won’t have the “first tier” intervention they need, which impacts teachers as well. We need better supports and services to immediately provide to students in need, and those who will be involved in helping them, before their struggles get worse.
Prioritizing overall improvements in school culture and climate also requires a systemic approach for both adults and students in our school community. We must focus on Social Emotional Learning and Restorative Practices, with an eye toward equity. Both SEL and RP are used to systematically and intentionally build equitable learning environments in schools. They are used in concert to improve school climate by strengthening student-to-student, staff-to-staff, and student-to-staff relationships, and enhance outcomes such as improved school or classroom climate, improved attendance and engagement, reductions in exclusionary discipline practices such as suspensions, and reduced disproportionality in discipline.
We will also focus on increasing access to social workers, other mental health professionals and counselors, and the availability and expansion of specialized supports and spaces such as ESS, iSTEP, the Hub, and the Loft, including possible expansion into elementary schools.
6. Repair our Broken Special Services
Our special education services need more attention from the district. We urgently need a top-down review of where we are falling short, from a review of our students placed out of district, to addressing chronic special education teacher vacancies, to struggles with our paraprofessionals. We want our students with disabilities to succeed and be well served within our schools, and will pursue efforts to create and secure the services for students that we currently lack.
We want to look at options to make it easier for students to be evaluated for special services when needed. We will review our district’s gatekeeping role that stands between a parents’ request for services and evaluations and the district’s determination to provide them, and ensure these determinations are being made equitably and soundly.
We also know too many students of color are pushed into special education without first being offered legally mandated mainstream supports, and we will ensure that these I&RS services are faithfully and equitably provided throughout our school system.
We will seek to ensure that our child study teams are adequately staffed and well trained on best practices in order to meet the district’s legal timelines and review the needs of all referred students.
We want to see that caseworkers are timely assigned and readily available to all special education students and families. Families should be able to expect that case managers and supervisors will timely respond to concerns. We must also ensure that our special education administration is adequately staffed to give proper supervision to providers and case managers so none of our students fall through the cracks.
The current shortage in special education teachers is real, but we can’t accept that as an excuse for failing our students and violating the law. We must explore ways for the district to incentivize special education teachers to come and fill vacancies in our district.
We will insist on strong supervision of the adults working with our most vulnerable students, and clear reporting guidelines and procedures for addressing any incidents between students and teachers or paraprofessionals so that parents are immediately notified and are given the maximum legally available information at the first available moment. Our fear of litigation should not trump our duty to engage with the families of our most vulnerable children.
We are eager to review the data from the district’s audit into out of district placements, and support an initiative to pilot classrooms that could support the needs of these children in our district schools. We further support efforts to identify high performing special education programs in our schools and work to replicate those classrooms and approaches to best serve our neurodiverse student body.
7. Improve Our Crumbling Infrastructure
We have beautiful new additions to many of our school buildings, but the old buildings are still falling apart. We need to finish the middle school projects within the Long Range Facilities Project by finding or securing the funding to make up for Covid price hikes.
As we evaluate the usage of our new buildings in light of student enrollment, we want the district to give consideration to using any excess elementary school space to future expansions of our preschool program to allow those students better access to district services.
However we cannot stop there. Our district still has approximately $200 million in repairs from deferred maintenance. We must evaluate and create a plan for how to raise money to address the remaining massive punch list of repairs. The board and district have ignored this problem for decades, which has gotten us where we are now – we can’t keep ignoring it.
8. Engage Intentionally with Families
Every year BOE candidates promise to address communication but families still feel lost. We need a culture shift in our district to intentionally engage with families and meet them where they are. Teachers and administrators should be expected to timely communicate with families, and empowered to give real answers.
We need to take the steps we can to work with busy households by making sure before- and after-care is broadly available for every family that needs it.
We are committed to ongoing review of our integration plan and enrollment procedures to fulfill our important equity work while also accommodating families.
Family engagement requires good communication, in large ways and small. We will pursue and support efforts to streamline use of district digital communication tools such as PowerSchool, continue to innovate in the many avenues used for family communication, and insist on an overhaul of our district’s website to make it a more useful tool for families and the community.
We also want to ensure a clear and prompt budgeting process so that a window into the district’s finances is provided promptly and is readily available and understandable to the public.
9. Stop Distractions on the BOE
Our district deserves an effective Board of Education. A board that can talk civilly with each other, work in concert rather than in conflict, and can be trusted to responsibly execute its duties to our community.
We commit to pursuing a collaborative process that gives adequate notice of initiatives and policies, engaging respectfully and productively with board members, the administration, unions, and families, and coming prepared to board meetings to efficiently and productively do our work for the district. Our goal is to create a well-run board that engenders new confidence from the community.
