Waterman, Valentin and Lester Leading in School Board Results

By • Apr 20th, 2010 • Category: Blog, News, Politics

With 93 percent of precincts reporting, Sterling Waterman, Angel Valentin and Carol Lester are in the lead in the election for three seats to the Board of Election. All three candidates were endorsed by Ward E councilman Steven Fulop; Waterman and Valentin also had the backing of the Jersey City Education Association, the local teachers’ union. Lester had additional backing from Dan Levin’s One Jersey City organization.

Valentin is an incumbent; as of right now, the other two incumbents — Terry Dehere and Gerry McCann — will not be re-elected; they ran on a separate slate with Hiral Patel, who also looks unlikely to take a board seat.

Jersey City voters also have voted for the local tax levy that funds the school district — at this point the vote is at 59.5 to 40.5 percent.

Votes are way up this year; there have been 31,612 votes cast for the candidates at this point. Last year just over 15,000 votes were cast.

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is the founding editor of the Jersey City Independent; he now works for a public-policy nonprofit in Trenton.
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  • Alb

    I think that one point that’s been overlooked a little bit is that, in addition to these results representing a victory for Steve Fulop and Dan Levin, they represent a huge victory for Learning Community Charter School.

    Lester started LCCS. Waterman said something that sounded anti-charter school at a forum, and he immediately had to take that back and say that he’d misspoke.

    In theory, a charter school is it’s own school district, but the Jersey City School District has some say over funding and support services for Jersey City charter schools, and it gets a cut of the money that the state spends to educate each student who attends a Jersey City charter school. The state also uses different funding formulas for charter schools and regular schools.

    The result: LCCS is only getting 53% as much state and local money per kid as the Jersey City School District gets.

    Perhaps more important: Most JCBOE members and staffers other than people like Suzanne Mack have a really weird, hostile attitude toward LCCS parents, and toward parents in school improvement groups.

    Maybe the election of Lester to the board means that the JCBOE will start to view LCCS, TECCS, etc. as laboratories for new ideas, rather than as interlopers to be ignored or squashed.