Montclair Board of Education Election 2026: Meet the Candidates

On the ballot as

Andrew W. Gideon

Montclair ties

Longtime resident; his children are Montclair Public Schools graduates

Work

Engineer and entrepreneur; co-founded and ran a company with his wife

Education

Engineering degree, University of Pennsylvania; master’s in computer science, NYU

Community

PTA volunteer, robotics mentor, regular speaker at Board of Education meetings

Referendum vote

Yes on both questions

Andrew Gideon has spent more than a decade in Montclair’s schools without ever holding an official role in them. He has been a PTA volunteer and a robotics mentor, and he is a familiar voice at Board of Education meetings, where he regularly brings his own analysis of the district’s performance metrics, budgets and schedules to the board and the public.

His children have graduated from the district, and he says they benefited greatly from it. But he says the data shows that not every student gets the same support, and that is what he wants to fix.

Gideon earned an engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s in computer science from NYU, and he co-founded and ran a company with his wife. In his campaign bio, he says current and past boards have sometimes failed to ask critical questions, let questions go unanswered without follow-up, and failed to push back when presentations lacked important details and context. He describes his approach as “responsible stewardship”: directing resources so the district gets the greatest value from each dollar, so that every Montclair student has “a real chance at success.”

At the forum

Why he’s running

“The biggest reason I’m running, frankly, is that I think I can help,” Gideon said. He has attended board meetings for more than 15 years, and in that time he has watched questions go unasked, or get asked and never answered. He wants to put a process in place so that questions “actually do receive answers.” “Process is something with which I’m very comfortable,” he said.

His own children did well in the district, “and it’s something that I want to assure happens for all of our students.” He finished with time left on the clock and checked with the moderators: “I’m allowed to go short, right?”

His top priority

Achievement. “That’s the reason everything else exists,” Gideon said. “The only reason we’re talking about finance or governance is because we are trying to educate our children.”

He wants the district and the superintendent to have specific, measurable and achievable goals, built together with the administration, so every decision can be weighed by whether it moves those goals forward. He pointed to a gap that district and state data already show in English and math by third grade. That data is sparse and heavily aggregated, he said, and third grade is late to find out. The district has better data, but “as far as I know,” he said, it isn’t provided to the board, and it certainly isn’t provided to the public.

The budget and the structural deficit

Gideon split the question in two. Knowing whether the district is on budget is a matter of monthly reporting, and that report already exists. “Ironically, it exists in a form that is too much information,” he said. It needs to be clear enough for board members and residents to see how revenue and spending compare with what was expected.

The structural deficit is the bigger problem, and longer planning horizons alone won’t solve it. On revenue, he pointed to grant opportunities the district isn’t pursuing, to PILOT payments the township receives that he said “really needs to go to the district,” and to the push in Trenton to improve school funding, where he said Montclair should take “a very active role.” On spending, he used transportation as an example. A volunteer committee set up by Superintendent Ruth Turner found that general education bus routes aren’t recomputed often enough, he said, leaving some routes “grossly underutilized” while others need a second bus to follow.

The referendum

Yes on both questions. Gideon advocated for the referendum at board meetings and encouraged others to vote for it. “I seem to be amongst a good crowd here,” he said, after the two candidates before him also said yes.

He said the deficit grew out of control failures, and out of an administration that “refused to say no to requests.” But he said responsibility starts with residents. When cuts were proposed in what he believes was 2023, students walked out of school and parents lined up to object at board meetings. “It was clear that we wanted schools that we could not afford,” he said. “Voting yes was a way to acknowledge that these are the schools that Montclair wants, and we have to pay for it.” He ran out of time as he began to talk about what comes next.

Academic goals

“We can push the ambition,” Gideon said. “We don’t have the expertise to know what is achievable. That’s something that’s on Dr. Turner’s side.” That makes goal-setting a collaborative job, and he said the current strategic plan isn’t specific enough.

Each goal, he said, should spell out how progress will be measured and how often. State test data won’t work for that, but the district has other tools. It used to use Renaissance and now, he believes, uses IXL to identify students who need extra help. “That same tool can serve a reporting goal and a feedback goal,” he said. He wants the board to be able to correct course quickly without creating “a reporting burden on the district.” Monthly, quarterly or twice a year is open for discussion. “I think annual is too far.”

Public trust

“Clearly the more data that’s out there, the greater we have an opportunity to build trust,” Gideon said. The board’s behind-the-scenes discussions, including email, are invisible to the public, and he said they “should be considered as a committee meeting,” with minutes at a minimum and preferably the whole exchange.

The board has talked about a shared spreadsheet where members submit questions for the administration to answer. Gideon wants those answers made public where the law allows, and a similar way for residents to submit questions and get answers. He is open to the town halls the current board has discussed. He also wants the board to push back on what he called the New Jersey School Boards Association’s recommendation of “practical silence” for most members. He once asked a board member why he voted a particular way, he said, and the member felt he couldn’t answer. “I just don’t believe that’s actually true.”

Committees

A hybrid that can change with the calendar and the topic. As budget season approaches, the budget committee could meet in public. Most of the time, he said, most committees should work on their own, in a much more time-efficient way.

Either way, the results need to be open. Gideon said he read two years of finance committee minutes and found some “extremely well-documented” and others “extremely cursory.” A transcript, or even a video recording, of each committee meeting would mean that “even if they’re not in public, they’re still public.” He suggested the split could even run topic by topic, with some subjects handled in public and others in committee.

A time he was wrong

Gideon’s team once built a software system for a client, working almost entirely with the company’s founders and owners. The owners were very happy with it. Then it reached the employees who did the actual work, who found it “completely unusable.” The business, it turned out, didn’t operate the way its leaders thought it did.

His team had to retrofit the system and start meeting with the people doing the work, which met “a little resistance,” before delivering something that matched how the business really ran. The lesson: “We need to make sure that we are asking the right questions of the right people.”

Lightning round

• Slushies in the cafeteria: Nay.
• AI in schools: Allow it for selected uses.
• Artificial turf: “I’m not a fan, but there are issues with grass.”
• Chromebooks: Selected uses in middle and high school.
• Forensic audit: “Must-have, but I hope they’re looking at the right thing.”
• Cellphones, backpack or lock them up: He asked which grades. He said the high school’s open campus has to be handled, and for other grades either approach is fine, “whichever is easier for the schools.”

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On the ballot as

Ayelet Haran

Montclair ties

Moved to Montclair in 2020; two young sons in Montclair Public Schools

Work

Nearly two decades in the private sector on public policy, health care access and corporate governance; currently in the pharmaceutical industry

Education

Master’s in public administration, Columbia University

Community

Parent volunteer at both of her children’s schools; board president, Montclair Community Farms

Referendum vote

Yes on both questions

Ayelet Haran grew up in Israel and went to public school there, an experience she says shaped her “deep belief in the importance of a strong, high-quality public education.” She moved to Montclair in 2020, and her two young sons attend Montclair Public Schools.

She holds a master’s in public administration from Columbia University and has spent nearly two decades in the private sector working on public policy, access to health care and corporate governance. She currently works in the pharmaceutical industry. She describes her strengths as problem-solving, strategic thinking and organizational leadership, and says she knows how to “ask difficult questions” and “turn ideas into effective action.”

She is an active parent volunteer at both of her children’s schools and board president of Montclair Community Farms, an urban farming organization that brings sustainable, locally grown produce to underserved communities. She is also an avid home gardener. She says she is running because Montclair’s public schools “deserve thoughtful, responsible, and effective leadership.”

At the forum

Why she’s running

Haran said she first thought about running because she “wasn’t being fully represented by the board.” As the parent of young children, she said, she felt their issues weren’t fully considered in discussions about policy, the school calendar and the budget.

She also named the district’s “very persistent achievement gap,” which she said needs “more data-driven solutions.” And as “a working parent who’s also first on the call sheet,” she wants the board to bring “the full view of Montclair parents and all sorts of families into the picture.”

Her top priority

The achievement gap, approached through a process she said she would use for every major board priority. The board’s job, she said, is to make sure priorities are set, and “that they are not all one priority.” If the achievement gap is a top priority, “it has to actually be listed,” with a strategic plan behind it.

In her model, the superintendent and staff present options, and the board tracks progress through monthly or quarterly check-ins and regular assessments. Then every decision, from curriculum to policy, is weighed by asking whether it advances the priority. That way, she said, the board can “not focus on the noise, but focus on what’s important.”

The budget and the structural deficit

Haran gave the night’s plainest definition of the problem: the district’s costs are “rising faster than the income that is rising through tax increases,” which means several hard budget years ahead. Long-term fixes will probably require policy changes “in Trenton,” she said.

In the short term, board members should study the largest expenses, follow where they’re headed and focus on the ones the board can actually influence. She pointed to next year’s negotiations with the teachers union, which she said will have “a very meaningful impact on our budget,” and said the board will need to look for savings elsewhere. She wants to see actual spending against projections, “more on a quarterly basis,” with the biggest gaps and swings flagged, “so that we can make decisions based on real data and not just on forecasts.”

The referendum

Yes on both questions, for different reasons. On the one-time increase to cover past deficits, “it was our responsibility to pay our bills.” Those expenses had already been spent educating students who have since graduated, she said, and the community should pay them back rather than push the cuts into future school budgets.

On the permanent increase, she said it would have been “incredibly unfair” to make students take severe cuts in the middle of the school year, or to ask the administration to absorb a year’s worth of cuts in half a year. She acknowledged that it created a higher tax base. But she said she sees costs rising fast in her own work in health care, and the district would likely have ended up in the same place anyway. It was important, she said, to “reset the tax base.”

Academic goals

Haran would start with the curriculum leaders Superintendent Ruth Turner has assigned, asking what test scores and teacher feedback show about the biggest gaps. From there she wants a strategic plan with short-, medium- and long-term goals, an optimistic case and a worst case, and the resources each would take. “Do we need new curriculum? Do we need to change or reallocate any teachers?”

The board would then get regular updates on both spending and results, so the plan can change as needed. The administration and its curriculum leaders would design the tactics, she said, and the district has to choose: “We can’t tackle everything at once.”

Public trust

“The board has done itself no favors,” Haran said, calling its communication “very disappointing as a community member.” She said there is a lot the board can do within state school-board guidance.

Her ideas: easy-to-read meeting summaries, because parents can’t be expected to watch three-hour meetings or “sift through 50 pages of agendas and addendums”; having the board president recap the issues raised in public comment and commit to publishing answers online; searchable transcripts; and budget information in a form people can digest. She pointed to Superintendent Turner’s more frequent, readable emails, which summarize what Turner tells the board, as a model the board could follow. She also supports town halls and other forums that make board members more accessible.

Committees

Back to standing committees. Haran called the current format “very inefficient” and said members may be censoring themselves because it “feels very public,” with so many people watching. Detailed work like drafting policy doesn’t belong in that setting. “You saw them the other day wordsmithing things,” she said. “It just does not seem like a good use of time.” Committees can stay transparent through meeting summaries, she said, or even Zoom.

A time she was wrong

Haran said people in the pharmaceutical industry tend to assume that news coverage will be negative. When another company launched a new product amid a lot of public concern, she was “convinced that this was gonna be a very negative story.” Digging into the data showed otherwise: the company weathered the attention well.

The lesson, she said, was “not to be distracted by noise,” and to “ground yourself in the information.”

Lightning round

• Slushies in the cafeteria: Nay. “Hard to get those stains out.”
• AI in schools: Selected uses “with strict guidelines.”
• Artificial turf: “Hate them.”
• Chromebooks: High school only.
• Forensic audit: Must-have.
• Cellphones, backpack or lock them up: “Lock them up in a pouch, preferably.”

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On the ballot as

David Moon

Montclair ties

Montclair High School parent; one child is a senior, another is in college

Work

Runs the data analytics firm Symmetric and a CFO roundtable; previously entrepreneur-in-residence at Ernst & Young; earlier worked at GLG

Community

Created NJSchoolInsights.com, which shows funding, spending and achievement data for New Jersey districts

Referendum vote

Yes on both questions

Dave Moon has two children who have gone through Montclair’s public schools. One is a senior at Montclair High School, and the other is in college. “Montclair’s been good to me,” he said at the forum. “It’s been good to my family.”

He is a data professional who runs the analytics business Symmetric and a CFO roundtable. He was previously an entrepreneur-in-residence at Ernst & Young, and earlier worked at GLG, where he saw the company build what became its expert network business, a story he told at the forum.

After Montclair’s fiscal crisis, Moon created NJSchoolInsights.com so that any family in New Jersey can see funding, spending and achievement data for its school district. He is running to promote achievement, transparency and accountability in Montclair’s public schools.

At the forum

Why he’s running

Moon said he was “shaken by what happened” in last year’s crisis, “and I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet.” He said he has done his best to reconstruct the story without having every detail at his fingertips, and that the board and community need more transparency to understand “how we got there, and more important, where we’re going.”

His goal is for Montclair to “be the best school district in New Jersey” and to meet the expectations of a diverse community, including families dealing with the achievement gap, families whose children are thriving, and families who “feel confused about where they are in the system.”

His top priority

Governance, oversight and transparency are all “terrific,” Moon said, but he sees them as part of “becoming a partner with the superintendent.” Superintendent Ruth Turner serves at the pleasure of the board, he said, and the board should tell her what it expects to see in her plans and in how she holds herself accountable.

He pointed to a recent board meeting where Turner’s presentation showed that Montclair has improved. What was missing, he said, was the next step: “the measurable and attainable goals that we’ve set going forward,” how she would report progress on them, and the investments she is making. He wants the same on finances, with a monthly report showing whether spending is coming in above or below the budget.

The budget and the structural deficit

“Three things bubble up to the top immediately,” Moon said. First, track variance against the budget and build it into one-year and three-year plans. Second, borrow best practices from other districts. He said he talked with the business administrator in Wayne to understand why Wayne’s per-pupil transportation cost is far lower than Montclair’s, and he wants the district to look outside itself the same way.

Third, Trenton. The state’s School Funding Reform Act is up for revision, he said, and Montclair has to be “very vocal” about it, with the board playing a role. Under the current formula, he said, Montclair gets “83 cents on the dollar” of what it is supposed to receive. (That figure is Moon’s; we have not independently verified it.)

The referendum

“Yes, yes.” Moon said he voted to keep local control. He understood that a state monitor could cut AP classes, clubs and sports teams, “a lot of the magic that brings together the story for Montclair and its children,” and he was afraid to lose that. He wrote about the referendum, knocked on doors and encouraged neighbors to vote yes.

He also said he understands residents who are upset about their higher tax bills: “I can’t disagree with them.” That, he said, is why “transparency is more important than ever,” to show that the district is doing everything it can to save money and invest in its students.

Academic goals

Moon started with a practical problem: the main measure of achievement, the annual state tests, is “always very far back in the rear view mirror.” He said he isn’t an expert in curriculum and testing, “but I would expect that in Ruth we’ll find someone who is.”

The board should agree with her on goals that are “time-bound and ambitious and appropriate,” he said, and then ask her how she will keep the board and the community informed “over three months, six months, a year, two years.”

Public trust

People lost trust, Moon said, because “a lot of people in the community just didn’t know where we were going.” When they found out, it was a deficit that “crippled our school system and threatened the education of our children.”

Rebuilding trust starts with a plan that is “shareable and digestible,” he said, along with regular emails from the superintendent, which he said she is doing “a great job” with, and summaries of board meetings. He supports an approach he said other districts use: collecting residents’ questions and publishing answers online once the board has them. And picking up on Pierson’s point, he said the board “shouldn’t be gagging all the board members.” Members are elected officials with their own perspectives and constituencies, he said, and they can share those views as long as they don’t claim to speak for the board.

Committees

Back to individual committees. The question, Moon said, is how the board can most efficiently tackle its objectives, and “a lot of times it’s about breaking it up and just division of labor.” Committees would bring their work product back to the full board.

A time he was wrong

“Every day I come up with a hypothesis and it just crashes against the rocks of reality,” Moon said. That’s fine, he said, as long as you’re ready to put things back together in a new arrangement that might work.

His example came from GLG. The founders were publishing books when a client told them, in Moon’s retelling, “I don’t need another doorstop,” but would pay a lot to be connected with the authors and their sources. The founders “turned on a dime,” he said, and built the expert network business, which still exists and continues to grow. His takeaway was to stay “responsive” and “humble.”

Lightning round

• Slushies in the cafeteria: No.
• AI in schools: Selected uses.
• Artificial turf: “Not a huge fan. Love grass.”
• Chromebooks: Selected uses.
• Forensic audit: Must-have.
• Cellphones, backpack or lock them up: Lock them up. He added that his own son keeps his phone in his backpack and, to Moon’s frustration, won’t text him back during class.

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On the ballot as

Corey Pierson

Montclair ties

Lived in Montclair nearly a decade; three children in Montclair Public Schools

Work

Co-founded a data analytics startup and ran it as CEO for a decade before selling it; recently started another company

Education

Studied computer science; MBA, Wharton

Referendum vote

Yes on both questions

Corey Pierson and his wife have lived in Montclair for nearly a decade, and their three children attend the public schools.

He studied computer science and earned an MBA from Wharton, then co-founded a data analytics startup. As CEO, he managed teams and budgets, worked with a board of directors and grew the company for a decade before selling it. He has recently started another company.

His platform is specific. He wants the district to publish monthly snapshots comparing actual spending with forecasts in every major category, and to publish reports on student screen time, broken down by age and by tool. He wants more data shared with the public and more ways for residents to ask questions and get answers, beyond public comment at board meetings. And he wants a more rigorous, data-driven way to measure whether changes to curriculum and programs improve achievement.

At the forum

Why he’s running

Pierson said he got involved when the referendum came. “I think like everybody in town woke up and you’re like, $20 million? What is going on here?” As he dug in, he became convinced that the board needs much better data to do its oversight job.

During the referendum campaign, he advocated strongly for local control, meaning that Montclair’s elected board makes the district’s decisions. “If I’m gonna advocate for local control, maybe I should offer to be part of the solution,” he said. He said he brings “a unique combination of financial savvy, of entrepreneurial skills, of the ability to communicate.”

His top priority

Financial transparency and oversight. When residents dug into the numbers during the referendum, Pierson said, the previous business administrator’s reports didn’t contain the level of detail that would have helped the board detect problems sooner.

In his own experience, “pretty much every single board meeting I’ve ever had was a conversation about here’s what our forecasts were, and here’s where the actuals are coming in.” He would have the board set a policy requiring a monthly snapshot of the budget forecast against actual spending in every major category. Variances would then be discussed “as they’re emerging, so that twenty million dollar messes don’t build over the course of a couple of years.”

The budget and the structural deficit

The structural deficit plays out over years, Pierson said. If costs like health care and salaries keep climbing faster than revenue, the gap keeps growing. Tracking the current year matters, but the district also needs “a three-year plan and a five-year plan” that project rising costs against expected tax revenue. “It’s not gonna be perfect,” he said, but the district has to plan for best and worst cases and adjust as news comes in. He hopes the administration has time for that now that it is “not so much in a crisis.”

He also wants to keep rebuilding the district’s reserve, the short-term cushion for surprises, which he described as a state-recommended level of about 2% of the budget. (New Jersey generally caps a district’s unrestricted surplus at 2% of its budget; it is a ceiling rather than a recommended target.)

The referendum

Yes on both, and he said he was “quite vocal” about it. He said the town was split roughly 50/50 and the choice was complicated, with a large tax increase for homeowners on one side and a state monitor on the other. “In my opinion, there was no moral high ground,” he said.

He landed on yes for local control. He said he researched and talked with districts that had state monitors, and worried a monitor “might make cuts that don’t represent the Montclair values, and we would have just absolutely no recourse.”

Academic goals

Pierson called achievement “a great opportunity to get the community channeled” toward something other than the financial problem. He would start by choosing the metrics that matter most. “If you have many priorities, you have none,” he said. The board should focus on “the vital few,” benchmark against comparable districts and work backward from where Montclair wants to be in three or four years, setting milestones along the way.

The catch is timing. State data can arrive 18 months late, which makes it “nearly impossible to iterate,” so “we absolutely must use leading indicators.” The board shouldn’t pick those indicators itself, he said; it should ask the administration’s experts. He pointed to the district’s new LinkIt platform, which he believes was put in place largely to show how students are doing right now.

Public trust

“I have a lot of opinions on this,” Pierson said. Residents are “very rightfully frustrated,” he said, and when people make public comments and get no response, “that’s not real conversation.” Sharing more data lets people answer some questions themselves.

He said board members are advised to route all communication through the board president, and while he understands some of the reasons, “everyone in town is gonna be electing us. They need to know why we vote the way we vote.” Explaining a vote on something like the school calendar “shouldn’t be considered an ethics violation,” he said. “How is anyone supposed to trust any of us” otherwise? He would create a way to gather residents’ questions outside of “the vitriol and the anger of public comment,” especially from people who can’t attend meetings, and post answers online. If trust is rebuilt, he said, residents can be proud of their district again. “It sounds crazy, but I really think it’s possible.”

Committees

Standing committees. “We need to divide and conquer,” Pierson said. In one giant public meeting running until “2:00 in the morning,” neither board members nor the public can think critically. “I can’t think of any organization, for-profit, non-profit, education, where everyone works on everything together.”

Committee reporting can’t be a “phone it in” summary, he said. He wants transcripts and summaries, possibly in a standard format, plus recaps at public meetings where other members can ask a question or two.

A time he was wrong

As a startup founder, Pierson said, being wrong “is more the norm than the exception.” You launch with conviction about who will love and buy your product, “and it is extremely humbling to then get out there and have it not work.”

His first company eventually succeeded. With his second, he and his partners have tried marketing technology, sales technology, health care technology and more, testing ideas to see what works. Going from a company hitting its revenue targets to an early-stage one “teaches you to be humble,” he said, and “to respect what people are actually telling you.” A growth mindset “is the only way you can kinda get through.”

Lightning round

• Slushies in the cafeteria: Nay.
• AI in schools: Allow it for selected uses.
• Artificial turf: He answered with a question, “Is the grass well-maintained?”, and stood by it when the moderators pushed back. Gideon, from the next seat over, called it “a very good board member response.”
• Chromebooks: Selected uses in middle and high school.
• Forensic audit: Must-have.
• Cellphones, backpack or lock them up: Lock them up.

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On the ballot as

Richard Reynics (pronounced REN-icks)

Montclair ties

Settled in Montclair in 2018; three children in Montclair’s elementary schools

Work

About 20 years in executive leadership roles in financial technology

Education

BA in political science, American University

Board experience

Hardyston Township Board of Education, 2005-07

Community

Two terms as Edgemont PTA president, after two as treasurer; co-chair, Superintendent’s Advisory Group on Budget & Finance

Referendum vote

Yes on both questions

Rich Reynics (pronounced REN-icks) and his wife, Mary, grew up next door in Clifton and settled in Montclair in 2018. They have three children in Montclair’s elementary schools.

From 2005 to 2007, he served on the Hardyston Township Board of Education, where he took part in budget committees, collective bargaining and district governance. In Montclair, he served two terms as treasurer of the Edgemont PTA, then two terms as its president. He currently co-chairs the Superintendent’s Advisory Group on Budget & Finance.

He holds a BA in political science from American University and has spent about 20 years in executive leadership roles in financial technology.

In his campaign bio, he says the fundamental issues for the incoming board “should be governance and oversight,” and that “we need to ensure last year’s financial mess never happens again.” A board that prioritizes oversight and accountability, and that communicates “in a transparent, two-way fashion with the public,” will find the district’s achievement and fiscal challenges “easier to solve,” he says.

At the forum

Why he’s running

Reynics opened by praising the field. Six people volunteering after the year the district had, he said, “is a win for Montclair.” He said he “felt personally compelled to run” because he can bring both experience, from serving on a New Jersey school board before, and fresh ideas “as an outsider to the Montclair board.” He finished with 30 seconds to spare.

His top priority

Governance and oversight, “because I think if you get that right at a board level, it makes our other problems, our achievement gap, our fiscal challenges, it makes everything else easier to solve.”

He named three changes. First, revamp the board’s committee structure. He said the move to a committee of the whole at the start of the year “probably did a disservice.” Second, focus on when information reaches the board, which he called one of the things that “got us into that $20 million hole.” Third, let the public see oversight happen. Too much of the board’s work happens offline, he said, with questions to the superintendent going by email, and it can feel “taboo to ask a question in public if you already know the answer.”

“With all due respect to the board president,” he said, he had heard the line “a few times” that the meetings are “held in public, not for the public.” “I disagree,” he said. Board members should ask tough questions in public “so that we can restore trust in the community, and people can see that oversight at work.”

The budget and the structural deficit

The structural deficit “is gonna be an unfortunate fact until we get reform at the state level on school funding,” Reynics said, and “the district can’t go back to the voters every year” for taxes above the cap. That means years of tough decisions, which makes the decision-making process critical.

He wants decision-critical information earlier, and more than one option. “My first question would be, okay, what other options were considered before this proposal?” He explained the mechanics: budgets have hard state deadlines, and if a board doesn’t pass one, the county decides it. So a board that gets a single proposal a week before the deadline faces “a pretty nuclear option” if it votes no. He said Superintendent Ruth Turner and Business Administrator Sullivan “have done a really good job” on this.

The referendum

Yes on both questions, and he was “a very vocal advocate for a yes vote.” “I will say that I wasn’t happy about it,” he added. “Running around and trying to convince all my neighbors and friends to vote for a huge tax increase was not a tremendously comfortable place to be.”

Given how severe the situation was, he said, it was the best way to keep local control and “minimize the damage to the children and to the staff.” It is also a major reason he’s running. “I never wanna see us back in this situation again,” he said. Now the district needs to “right the ship” and get back to focusing on student achievement.

Academic goals

Last year, Reynics said, the fiscal crisis kept Superintendent Turner and the administration from focusing on student achievement, “and it’s really important that be the main focus in this coming year.” The board’s role is to make sure goals are “both ambitious but achievable,” which means incremental progress, since the achievement gap and “our lack of achievement in math” are “not getting fixed in one year.”

He wants milestones, with honest public conversations at each one, especially when the district misses. Was it a lack of resources? Did the approach need adjusting? “Did other priorities come and crash in and pull us off course?” He also wants a narrower strategic plan. The current one, he said, is “way too broad. It’s just the kitchen sink of every possible priority,” and it doesn’t help the board make tough choices.

Public trust

The public needs to see oversight happen at board meetings, Reynics said. “Just because you’ve asked a question offline and gotten the answer doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask it again in public.”

He wants to rethink the meeting format, too. In public comment, he said, the frustration in people’s voices makes it sound “like they’re screaming at a wall that doesn’t scream back, because that’s what it’s like.” He said Montclair’s interpretation of New Jersey School Boards Association guidance “borders on being absurdly strict,” and he would “push the envelope on that as much as possible.” Finally, he said the board should make sure closed session is used only for what state law permits. He was careful to say he wasn’t alleging a problem: “None of us are in that room, so we wouldn’t know.”

Committees

“This is the kind of thing I geek out on,” Reynics said. He would return to standing committees for everything except the budget, because committees can “dive deeper into things” and give issues “the space to breathe,” with reports to the public on what was discussed. The budget would stay with the full board in public, “given what we went through last year and over the last couple of years.” He called it “a hybrid.”

A time he was wrong

“Early in my career I think I was a classic over-complicator,” Reynics said, with “a youthful chip on my shoulder, wanting to prove I was, like, the smartest person in the room.” He built processes and platforms that were “way too complicated to ever work.”

He has since embraced simplicity, he said, and becoming a parent cured him of being a control freak. He added a more recent lesson: he has tried to stay off social media as much as he can, because these issues “need space and time to breathe. They’re not 60 character or less issues.”

Lightning round

• Slushies in the cafeteria: Nay.
• AI in schools: Selected uses in high school.
• Artificial turf: “Grass fields only. I hate the turf.”
• Chromebooks: Keep them for selected uses.
• Forensic audit: Must-have.
• Cellphones, backpack or lock them up: He’d want to hear from administrators and parents first, “but if I have to make a choice, my inclination is lock them up.”

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On the ballot as

George Simpson

Montclair ties

Montclair resident since 2011; twin sons at Montclair High School, both on the rowing team

Work

Career in advertising as a copywriter and creative director; now at a major credit card company

Education

Fordham University

Referendum vote

Yes on the one-time increase, no on the permanent increase

George Simpson has lived in Montclair since 2011. He graduated from Fordham University, and he is the father of twin boys, both on the rowing team at Montclair High School.

He spent his career in advertising, working his way into the creative side as a self-taught copywriter at some of the country’s best-known agencies, on brands and campaigns he says “everyone knows.” He says the work taught him not only to solve creative problems but “to solve problems creatively.” Later, as a creative director, he found that doing the work and managing it took entirely different skills: getting projects approved by finding common ground with clients, and managing other creatives, which he compares to “herding cats.”

He is now in what he calls the third act of his career, at a major credit card company. He says he would bring the board “a relentless work ethic,” an appreciation for fresh thinking and an ability to get people to rally behind change, with the goal of making Montclair’s district “one of New Jersey’s best.”

At the forum

Why he’s running

Simpson said his motivation “has evolved over the last couple of months.” In July, it was the $20 million deficit. “I just felt like the board was stonewalling and dragging their feet,” he said, and that the board had moved on before the town had, “because we haven’t gotten any information.”

Since then, he said, he has realized the district has “a lot more problems than just $20 million”: spending problems and achievement-gap problems. He has spent his career solving problems “in an interesting way, in an unexpected way,” and he thinks Montclair could use “some fresh ideas, some bold thinking. And let’s just say, ‘What if? What if we tried?'”

His top priority

A ranking goal. Simpson said Montclair pays the 13th-highest property taxes in the state, while rankings have put the district anywhere from 26th to 56th. “We’re spending enough money to be around the top 10, and we’re nowhere near the top 10.” In his career, he said, “we were always aiming towards a goal,” and he worries the district is “just lurching from day to day.”

His vision: “We wanna be top 10 in the next five years.” Closing the achievement gap would improve the ranking “dramatically,” he said. The board would set the vision and charge the superintendent with the tactics and strategies, whether that means closing the gap or “increasing the number of AP courses, whatever it takes to move Montclair up to a place where we’re getting our money’s worth.” (The tax and ranking figures are Simpson’s; we have not independently verified them, and school rankings vary by publisher.)

The budget and the structural deficit

Simpson wants to come at the problem from “a more creative point of view” and spend “smarter.” A district can be derailed by overspending on lots of small things, he said, as easily as on big ones.

His example was busing, which he said is hard to talk about but has to be discussed. “We spend upwards of $10 million a year just moving kids around town in service of the magnet system,” he said. The magnet system “is not the end goal. It’s a tactic to reach the end goal, which is full integration, and we should be doing that.” But “if we spend $10 million just to get kids in the seats, and then we don’t have enough money to educate them once they get there, what are we doing?”

His idea is a “neighborhood magnet system.” Students who live within a quarter mile of an elementary school would attend that school, and everyone else would stay in the magnet system. He estimated it could save “maybe 20%” of what the district spends on buses. (His figures; not independently verified.)

The referendum

“I’m gonna break the streak,” Simpson said. He was the only candidate to split his vote: yes on the one-time increase, no on the permanent one. “I felt like there was no accountability attached to a permanent tax increase,” he said. It was “simply the board digging themselves out of a hole that they had created and basically just dumping it on the doorstep of everyone who lives in Montclair.”

He was willing to “take that hit” of the one-time increase to get the district out of the hole, “but a permanent tax increase? There’s just no justification for that.” The vote, he said, was “about accountability and transparency, and that’s what we need.”

Academic goals

Academic goals tie back to his top-10 target, which he called “that North Star.” Simpson would dig into the data to find which students are falling behind and in which grades, broken out by cohort, “whether it’s Black and Hispanic students in the third grade, or girls in the sixth or seventh grade.”

The board would set the goals, he said, and ask the superintendent to develop strategies to reach targets such as “raising scores by 5%.” Rather than creating new forms of data, he would track progress by marking period, “because that’s the way parents see it, that’s the way kids see it.”

Public trust

Simpson picked up a line Reynics had mentioned earlier, that a current board member said the meetings “are in public, but they’re not for the public.” “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a greater summation of the problems that we face with the transparency and the communication on the board,” he said.

The board represents some 40,000 residents, “from the kids to the parents and everybody,” he said. “That’s who we work for.” Its job is not only to make sure “every T is crossed and every I is dotted, but to make sure that we involve the town.”

He called Superintendent Ruth Turner’s regular emails “a nice approach.” But he said her attitude about the deficit in a recent interview with Montclair Local came through, in his words, as “We’re done with this. We’re moving on.” “Are you?” he asked. “Because I don’t think the town feels satisfied yet.” There are rules about what board members can say, he said, but “we should be trying to say as much as we can, not say as little as we can.” He wants more outreach, timed meeting agendas and concise meetings that residents can follow.

Committees

Individual committees. They give board members a better chance to be heard, Simpson said, and a way to match members’ expertise and passions to problems. “More gets done when you have fewer people. The more people you have, the less gets done.” Committees can dig deeper and report their findings to the full board. “Too many cooks always tend to spoil whatever you’re cooking.”

A time he was wrong

“Oh, I wasn’t expecting that,” Simpson said. In advertising, he said, you come up with a great solution, “but you gotta sell it,” and someone else often brings in new information. “My entire career has been about pivoting,” he said. “It’s literally what I’ve done for the last 35 years.”

The lesson of advertising, he said, is that “not everybody knows everything, and some interesting thoughts can come from the most unexpected places.” The goal is “the best solution, not just your solution.”

Lightning round

• Slushies in the cafeteria: Nay.
• AI in schools: “Right now, total ban.” He was the only candidate to say so.
• Artificial turf: “Ban artificial turf.”
• Chromebooks: “Keep ’em.”
• Forensic audit: The only candidate who didn’t call it a must-have. “I personally think it’s a waste of time,” he said.
• Cellphones, backpack or lock them up: “Lock ’em up, because they won’t stay in the backpack.”

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