Issue 174: JCBOE extravaganza!
Plus: Halloween houses on the West Side, and a feral who is charming us all
Good morning!! Oh my goodness, there is a lot here. I’ve got loads of JCBOE trustee info and more. I hope you have a wonderful Sunday, a fun-filled Halloween, and as always, thank you for reading! — Amy
(Probably more than) Everything you want to know about the JCBOE Trustee election
Hello!!! It’s that issue you’ve been waiting for! I swear I’ve seen many of you on various social media platforms complaining that you don’t have enough information about the upcoming Jersey City Board of Ed trustee election. If this is you, oh boy, your Sunday is all laid out for you right here: I have a Q&A with six of the candidates (with some very lengthy answers!), links to lots of articles, and more.
First off, here is a link to the Q&A (it might ask you if you want to download the app — just ignore that! you can click the little X in the window that pops up). The questions I asked came from both me and from readers of this newsletter, and this is what they are:
Name/What do you do for a living?
What are your qualifications to be elected to the Jersey City school board?
If elected, what issues would you highlight or spend the most time on during your tenure?
What inspired or encouraged you to run for the JCBOE?
Please use this space below to include any addition information about yourself personally that you think makes you a good candidate for this position.
Reader question: a decision was made to move JCBOE meetings to a format where it is more difficult for the public to make comments and statements to the board. Do you intend to change this back to the way it was before? Or do you think the meetings run more efficiently without public comment?
Reader question: Several candidates have noted their plans to “cut waste” as a way to eliminate budget issues. If elected, what sort of cuts would you like to see made?
Reader question: Will you support “school streets” (car-free zones outside entrances to improve safety during pickup/dropoff) and other measures to help kids get to school safely?
Reader question: We know the schools are in very old buildings that need a lot of work. There is a current rumor going around parents that while many of the schools have the physical AC units to install, the schools themselves cannot handle the burden on their electricity. How would you prioritize fixes and improvements that need to be made?
Reader question: on a scale of one to ten, how would you rate the importance of arts classes, music classes, foreign languages, and athletics (please give each subject its own rating) in public school education?
Reader question: special ed and related services are an important part of the services our school system provides. What would you do to make sure that they get the funding and support they need?
Reader question: guidance counselors are important to helping students -- especially high school students -- find their way to college, trade schools, or the workforce. And yet, because there are relatively few spread out over so many students, it's hard for them to do their job. What do you see as the role of the guidance counselor? What do you think can be done so that students get the kind of information they need to move on successfully after graduation?
Free space for anything that you'd like to add that you don't think this questionnaire has addressed. Write as much or as little as you like.
Six out of seven of the candidates responded (Miriam Tawfiles is the only one not to), and together they wrote about 12,500 words. When I tell you this document is long… it’s long. It’s 22 pages long. But I think that’s terrific — it gives you a real sense of who these people are and what they’d bring to the position of trustee1.
***
The basics
There are seven candidates running to serve on the Jersey City Board of Education; you’ll get to vote for three people. In some media reports you’ll see mention of an eighth candidate, but he dropped out very early. Of those seven candidates, three of them (Natalia Ioffe, Ahmed Kheir, and Melany Cruz Burgos) are on the Education Matters slate, which is supported by the teachers union, the JCEA. Then there are two candidates, Matt Schneider and Tia Rezabala who are running on the slate For Stronger Schools. Sam Sumit Salia is running on the slate Parents for Education while Miriam Tawfiles is not running on any slate. On the current JCBOE, the 9-0 members are all with Education Matters. The only one of the candidates running currently who is doing so for re-election is Ioffe.
The candidates have participated in a number of forums during the campaign. The Journal Square Community Association had a forum with the candidates last week, and if you go to their Facebook page, you can see a two-hour video of the event. On October 8th, a group of local neighborhood and civic orgs got together and hosted a similar event, and they have a whole briefing document available with a ton of information including links to videos the candidates made, news articles, and more.
CivicParent, aka the site maintained by CPA and local activist Brigid D’Souza, has put together a page that has a ton of information about the schools and the board in general, including info like the role charter schools play on the budget and so much more. She also breaks down the percentage of things like how many students are economically disadvantaged and how many kids need ESL learning. If you think to yourself “the budget of our local schools is $1billion — that’s impossible!” you owe it to yourself to look at what she’s written, because she explains how we got to that point. Her writing also includes a link to a document that she gave out at the Oct. 8th event mentioned above.
***
Funding
I’ve had readers write in and ask about the funding for these different slates, asking if any of them are getting money from questionable orgs or PACs. In general, the only slate that seems to be spending at any significant level would be Education Matters, and it’s been very transparent that they’re funded by the JCEA PAC. After looking around, I couldn’t find any information connecting the other candidates or their slates to fundraising of really any kind, PAC or otherwise.
What I mean in terms of spending: you don’t see any of the non-JCEA-associated campaigns with huge signage, advertising, or mailings, at least so far, in an excess that would lead most people to the conclusion that they were getting lots of money sent their way. For instance, a full color mailing to all the homes in Jersey City would cost thousands of dollars, and I haven’t seen that from any of the independents, so I’m not shocked that they haven’t declared their donors because it’s possible they don’t have anyone donating at a level where they have to declare2. I’ve seen a few independent candidates pop up in terms of advertising on websites and social media, but those ads can be incredibly cheap, and they seem to be few and far between — my feeds are certainly not inundated. The Education Matters team did at least one mailing and has signage, but even they’re not leaning into this election super hard — and again, it’s clear where that money is coming from, but this time out they don’t seem to be spending wildly as sometimes happens in election cycles. We’re not talking about a multi-million dollar campaign here.
I’ve searched ELEC — the statewide database for all things campaign contribution related — and I’m just not finding a whole lot on any of the candidates or their slates for this election (the JCEA PAC’s info seems up-to-date, but that’s about the only thing I could find). My guess is — and please understand this is a guess — this means that most of them are running such a shoestring campaign that they haven’t had to declare their financials to the state. It’s possible that some of the campaigns are out of compliance, but again — without evidence that they’re doing massive spending, I don’t see a reason to jump to this conclusion. Meaning, if these campaigns were awash in mailers and other expensive things and had no reporting on ELEC, it would be very reasonable to assume they weren’t in compliance and were being funded by someone… but I’m just not seeing that.
EDIT: 10/27 1:30pm: I heard from Matt Schneider this afternoon that he did indeed file. I have no reason to doubt him, but when I attempted to find the financial information about his campaign on Wednesday afternoon (searching under his slate name, his personal name, “M Schneider,” various spellings of “Schneider” etc) and also asked a friend of mine who uses ELEC regularly to double check for me, nothing came up. I have no idea why it is, but I also have no reason to suspect anything strange afoot — as noted in previous posts, the website seems like it was designed in the 1990s or something, and I wouldn’t doubt that occasionally it has hiccups.
So, after what’s reviewing what he sent me, it looks like he raised roughly $6,000 total, which includes two $1,000 donations he made himself to his campaign. The other donations seem to be from individuals, some of whom are local and some of whom live elsewhere in the country, but again — none of this is terribly unusual. He appears to have about seven donors who have contributed to his campaign; all individuals, no PACs.
***
Endorsements
Ok, here’s where things get really interesting this time.
Mayoral candidate and current County Commissioner Bill O’Dea has endorsed Education Matters. That’s no surprise — O’Dea is aligned with the teachers union, so his endorsement was pretty much a done deal from the start. But mayoral candidate/current City Council President/Pastor Joyce Watterman and mayoral candidate/current Councilman for Ward E James Solomon have both endorsed For Stronger Schools, which seems a bit odd in terms of strategy. If I’m just going to be blunt, candidates for office generally align themselves with the ticket that’s expected to win — and it’s rare to see candidates endorse other candidates if they’re not at least very competitive. In this case, Education Matters is widely expected to sweep the race easily as they have in every election over the last few years, so to see two mayoral candidates endorse a different ticket is interesting.
Could For Stronger Schools be more competitive than originally thought? Maybe — with zero polling, it’s tough to tell. It’s hard for me to imagine that the JCEA doesn’t have the get-out-the-vote infrastructure necessary to easily manage a win, but maybe having the election on the same ballot as the presidential and senate races will mean more people will go to the polls and their votes might shake out differently than if it was an off year. It’s hard to tell. I’d imagine that Solomon will try to prove both his and Ward E’s might by pushing a strong turnout for For Stronger Schools, if for no other reason than to send a message to his opponents in the race — in particular O’Dea, but McGreevey as well. If he can deliver an upset, that would be completely fascinating, and would signal really good things for his own campaign. Even just a strong showing in E for the slate would be impressive and look good for Solomon.
Meanwhile, another issue entirely — and this is going to get a bit complicated, so I want to make sure I lay this out fully — Schneider and Salia both got a bit of a dubious not-quite-an-endorsement. The right wing, “parental rights” organization New Jersey Project included both of them as part of a lengthy list on their website of recommended candidates. This has caused some very obvious concern, for very good reasons. Groups like this really don’t seem to represent the majority of JC voters, and it’s very possible that a recommendation from this group may turn voters off from these candidates more than it will send voters their way.
Two things I want to make pretty clear about this particular “recommendation”:
This group apparently doesn’t interview or talk to candidates before including them on their list, which they state is not an endorsement per se (this is reflected on their own website, which states “not an endorsement nor authorized by any candidate or any candidate’s committee” on what is a list of “recommended” candidates). It doesn’t seem that either candidate even knew they were on the list until suddenly, they were. This “recommendations” doesn’t seem to have come with any money or other support; they were simply added to a list of names on a website.
Schneider sent me a statement (without any prompting from me) addressing the situation, and has asked me to include it in his Q&A. I agreed. This is ultimately what has led me to even address the issue. It’s notable that his statement (at the end of his entry in the Q&A) strongly disavows the organization and their beliefs.
For both of those reasons, I have questions about whether or not this is something to be taken too seriously. Of course, as someone who is a huge supporter of trans rights and LGBTQ+ rights as well as the rights of educators and unions and so forth, I’m honestly concerned and troubled by this group. I don’t like anything that this group stands for, and I wouldn’t want to elect anyone who reflects their views. But I’m also concerned about what it means that a random, outside group can just toss a list of candidates up on their website after having not spoken to them or given them any money, and have that “recommendation” tank a candidacy. If either candidate had cashed a check from the group — ok, fine, that would make it clear to me where they stand. But I don’t see any evidence that such a thing happened3.
I don’t know — I’m uncomfortable with this “recommendation” from numerous angles. If I’m being honest, this entire thing would have escaped my notice except for the fact that Schneider sent me his statement. But in fairness to everyone, I’m noting it here, and you can decide for yourself how you want to take in this information.
***
With all that behind us, I hope you now have enough information to feel good about picking three candidates for this election. Early voting is now underway if you just want to cross that task off your list, and here is a list of polling locations and hours. Remember that you can vote in any of the locations — there were reports of long lines to vote at City Hall on Saturday morning, but I voted at the Gallo Center in Lincoln Park just a few hours later and there was zero line (well, there was a trunk-or-treat event happening in the parking lot that was pure chaos, but none of that affected my ability to vote quickly and easily). So if there continues to be a crowd in front of one location, remember you can always go to a different one.
Lastly, every time I do a Q&A with candidates, people write in to ask if it’s ok to share with people on Facebook or elsewhere or even to print out the info and hand it out to voters who aren’t online. And yes, of course!! I want this info available so people can make informed decisions. It’s helpful to me (personally) if you link to the newsletter as opposed to the Q&A directly (just because it helps me to keep track of how many readers I have, which in turn helps me to get candidates to agree to do future Q&As), but honestly — just share in whatever format makes the most sense to you. It’s much more important to me that people get info than I get credit or links/traffic or whatever.
But above all, please vote!
Halloween houses!
If you’re on the West Side and looking for some fun places to take kids trick or treating (or just to gawk at some amazing displays), here’s a couple for your consideration:
The Halloween House on Harrison, as this is known, has its own Facebook page. The front lawn is absolutely loaded full of every kind of inflatable, animatronic Halloween creature you can imagine. The family has a Youtube channel with a video of the scene, and on Halloween night they give out candy and lemonade and have extra figures and fun things set up for neighborhood kids for just that night. The family is fundraising to help with the cost of candy (which is SUPER expensive this year) for the presumably hundred+ kids who come by — if you stop by on Halloween, you can donate via a QR code they have posted, or check out their Facebook page for more info. Located on Harrison Avenue, near JFK.
Right down the street on Bentley (between JFK and West Side, closer to JFK) is this house. The pics I took don’t do it justice, but it’s a massive display — and on Halloween, they have a special costume contest for kids 1-12 at 5pm:
There’s a lot of houses and apartment buildings in that area that have up amazing displays. I seem to be nursing a last minute head cold so unfortunately I couldn’t track down as many as I’d have liked, but wander around and see what you discover — there’s a lot of great stuff out there!
Feral cat of the week
This sweet baby has been stealing hearts on Gautier Ave:
She’s rail thin (don’t worry, it sounds like she’s being fed extremely well, but the suspicion is that she has a litter of kittens hidden somewhere so she’s probably burning through those calories nursing) and is super affectionate. My suspicion is that she’ll be an indoor cat as soon as her kittens are located and the weather gets chilly — she’s not going to have any trouble charming her way into some pretty sweet digs. Sounds like more than one neighbor is weighing taking her in, and I’m sure her kittens will be fine too. But if you see her, give her a little skritch because she is for sure a lover.
ICYMI
Housing advocate and JSQCA Affordable Housing Taskforce member Katie Brennan is running for Assembly in the 32nd District.
Candidate for mayor Jim McGreevey will be hosting a number of upcoming Town Halls that are free and open to the public — you should 100% go if you’re able. From a press release:
Sunday, October 27th, at the Barrow Mansion (83 Wayne Street) from 2 - 4 pm;
Monday, October 28th, at Monumental Baptist Church, Fellowship Hall (121 Lafayette Street) from 6:30 to 8:30 pm
The candidate also put out an additional press release calling for reform on Jersey City driving/gridlock issues, mostly downtown and as they relate to the Holland Tunnel:
As Mayor of Jersey City, I would take immediate action to abate this emergency condition [referring to intense gridlock coming out of the Holland Tunnel into the streets downtown, where even emergency vehicles can’t get through]:
1. I would ban commercial vehicles on Sundays during the extreme traffic hours from 3 pm to 9 pm and broaden the no-left-turn prohibitions to additional times.
2. During these Sunday restricted hours, I will station auxiliary Jersey City Police Department officers at key intersections (Palisade Avenue and Newark Avenue, Palisade Avenue and New Jersey Route 139, Summit Avenue and New Jersey Route139, and Chestnut Street and Pavonia Avenue) to ensure these policies are vigorously enforced. I will adjust the staffing and sites accordingly.
3. During these Sunday restricted hours, I am prepared to stop the problem at its root cause. During specified emergency times and conditions, I would close Jersey City to non-residents exiting the New Jersey Turnpike/Interstate 78 at the Christopher Columbus Drive exit. Depending on conditions, non-residents would be redirected back to the Turnpike.
As State law requires, if our actions impact a State highway, we will seek approval from the State Commissioner of Transportation. As Mayor, armed with statistics on emergency response times and other transportation analyses, I would seek the Commissioner’s approval to restrict non-residents from exiting the New Jersey Turnpike.
(All bolding is per the original press release. I chose to make it italics to show that it’s a quote.)
There was a whole conversation on Twitter as to whether or not these proposals are even legal, let alone reasonable. Honest to god, I don’t drive and I don’t live downtown and I really don’t know the nuts-and-bolts of the law or policy here, so I don’t really know as to whether his ideas on this issue are good or bad. But just sharing that info so you can make up your own mind.
Reminder that Sunday, Oct 27th, there is a huge Trump rally happening at Madison Square Garden, pretty much all day. No reasonable person takes the PATH train to 33rd Street on a Sunday anyway, but if you have to, my guess is it’s much better to take the WTC line and then… I don’t know… walk to where you need to go? At the very least, if you’re taking it to 33rd, probably best to exit at least at 23rd, because god only knows what security is gonna be like.
I would really like to open this up to other publications, neighborhood organizations, and other groups who may be reading this: please consider making open-ended, any-length-the-candidate-wants information available to your readers/supporters in text format. The feedback I hear from candidates is that they’re thrilled to be able to express themselves fully and not in soundbites, and written — where they can add sources, edit, etc — vs on forums and quick interviews. Meanwhile, the feedback I hear from readers is that they’re relieved to read full responses while they’re commuting or during breaks throughout the day, or maybe even in one long stretch, as they’re figuring out who to vote for, as opposed to making a decision about something important based on basically the same amount of information one gets in a TikTok video. This idea that we, as human beings, only communicate in short, punchy phrases of 200-400 words is destroying us, and it’s not what people want or need. My Q&As are by far the most read/viewed things I publish, and I encourage you to “steal” (obviously it’s not an original idea from me, either) extremely long form interviews with candidates from me for all elections going forward, forever. I will not be offended; in fact, I would be delighted if other places started doing the same thing I am here. I very honestly do not want to write this newsletter forever, but I do want voters to get the information they need, and I really think long-form pieces like this are a big part of that. It costs you nothing extra to link to a document that lets candidates fill in as much color about an issue as they feel is important. If voters’ eyes glaze over — plenty of short form publications out there already; there’s no need to compete with them.
I mean look: is it possible that some nefarious, secretive group is funding the independents? I mean, it’s 2024; it’s always possible. I just see no evidence of this. In the past when Jersey City has had some really competitive JCBOE elections, real estate developers have been very upfront and open about endorsing and funding candidates. I don’t see that happening currently.
It’s also a little weird to me that they would have endorsed Schneider and Salia and not Schneider and his slate mate Rezabala? or maybe Salia and Tawfiles, since they’re both completely independent and running alone? It really makes me question how much this group has actually looked into these candidates and understand this particular race, vs how much they’re just quickly googling who is running against the teachers’ union — who the group seems very against — and sticking those names up on their list. I really, really don’t know, and I’m really just trying to be as fair as possible to everyone involved.