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 Will Meyer. Read our 2023 election guidelines here.
Will Meyer (Photo by Morgan Triska)
Biography
William Meyer is an education lawyer for special needs families, a leader in local community organizations, a devoted dad, and a proud resident of South Orange.
Born and raised on the North Shore of Massachusetts, Will is the product of a high-quality public school education. He received a B.S. in Print Journalism from Emerson College and a J.D. from the Washington College of Law at American University. He is admitted as an attorney in the state of New York.
Will and his family moved to South Orange from Brooklyn in 2019. His wife Katie is Chief Innovation Officer for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and serves on the South Orange Environmental Commission. Their son Henry is an incoming third grader at South Mountain School, and their daughter Josephine is a preschooler at the Montrose Early Childhood Center.
Will is proud to serve on the SOMA Special Education Parent Advisory Committee (SEPAC) as Vice President of Policy Initiatives, and represents SEPAC on the SOMSD Presidents’ Council. He is also Co-Chair of Programming for the South Mountain PTA.
Professionally, Will has fought for the better part of two decades defending the rights of special needs children to a quality education. He began this work in clinical programs for incarcerated children with disabilities in the District of Columbia. Will then worked for six years for Advocates for Children of New York, a nonprofit devoted to protecting every child’s right to an education. At AFC, he represented children with disabilities from low-income families at IEP meetings and in lawsuits against their school districts, led trainings for professionals and communities, and supervised corporate pro bono attorneys.
Since 2012, Will has continued this work in a preeminent special education law firm in the city, focused entirely on the representation of the parents of children with special needs, resolving disputes with their school districts and securing appropriate educational services and placements where their children can thrive. Despite the adversarial nature of this work, Will is pleased to maintain collegial, professional, productive relationships with the school district attorneys, advocates, and staff he encounters across the table, which in turn benefits his clients.
In addition to direct client advocacy, Will mentors and supervises associates in his firm, directs the firm’s technology planning and policy, and regularly presents continuing legal education courses to attorneys nationwide on special education law. He is a member of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates.
Will is eager to bring to the Board of Education his depth of experience working with families in critical need of more support, his leadership in educating others about this work, his collegial and consensus-building approach to problem solving, and his dedication to public service. He’ll offer a fresh set of eyes and a steady hand to tackle the challenges we face in ensuring the best possible education for every one of our children.
Platform (with Shayna Sackett-Gable and Liz Callahan)
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.
