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.
My name is Meghan Mortenson and I’ve been a resident of Maplewood since 2017. I am a teacher with degrees in Special and Elementary Education. I have a second grader and a kindergartner at Clinton Elementary School. I am writing to enthusiastically endorse Jeff Bennett and Tony Mozzacchi for the Board of Education and to encourage others to write in their votes for Jeff and Tony.
Jeff and I started speaking in the Fall of 2021, the inaugural year of the Intentional Integration Initiative (III), when my then-Kindergartner was placed across town at Clinton. I was immediately struck by Jeff’s intellectual curiosity in wanting to figure out how the “algorithm” actually worked in practice and how it was impacting families that received high “random number” assignments. Jeff was able to see problems before others even knew they existed. However, what’s so special about Jeff is not his ability to see a problem, but his undying drive to figure out how to fix it. Jeff doesn’t take hard ideological stances, which is something that I believe has caused a significant schism within the BOE. Rather, Jeff is a true pragmatist – he cares about identifying problems, analyzing data, and coming up with effective and efficient solutions. For example, last year when the district was taking busing away from students, Jeff was figuring out how to utilize the empty seats on the buses that we currently had. This year, when transportation issues persisted, Jeff came up with a solution: transportation dyads to cut back on distance and travel time for our students while still maintaining the integrity of the III. Jeff’s passion and attention to detail are what set him apart.
Tony is equally the right person for the job. Like many of you, when we chose South Orange/Maplewood as our home, we looked for a diverse community, proximity to New York City, and good schools. Something that makes SOMSD stand apart is its many Advanced Placement classes as well as commitment to the Arts. The list of famous alumni is deep. Tony understands the talent we possess as a community; he is a product of this District (Tuscan, Maplewood Middle and Columbia High School) and served as the CHS Supervisor of Fine and Performing Arts from 2010-2013 . He is a music educator who insists that all our students be given the opportunity to take courses that provide rigor. He has always advocated to provide our youngest students with more art, music, dance (just to name a few) opportunities during the school day.
SOMSD is currently being confronted by many complex issues, including the Long Range Facilities Plan, teacher retention, problems within Special Education, the continued implementation of the III, the Fergus report, and the Superintendent’s contract renewal. We need practical BOE members who are driven less by ideological motivations and more by common sense solutions that work for the entire community. Tony and Jeff are both former BOE members whose governance experience will prove invaluable in tackling these issues beginning in January. Since the second they announced their candidacy, Tony and Jeff have been unequivocal on where they stand and are ready to do the work on day one. Please join me in correctly spelling Jeff Bennett and Tony Mazzocchi and then filling in the bubbles under their names.
Meghan Mortenson
Maplewood
