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Timothy J. Horan

 

 

Making a first run for the board of education is Timothy Horan, who is retiring this spring after 30 years of teaching in Guilderland schools, mostly at Pine Bush Elementary. This year, he is teaching second grade there.

“It’s kind of perfect timing for me,” he said of his reasons for wanting to run now. He said that in retirement he plans to “stay in the district and keep trying to improve the profession.”

Horan, 55, and his wife, Barbara Horan, met while both were teaching at Westmere Elementary. She has been with Guilderland Elementary School for a number of years, and is currently teaching third grade. The couple lives on West Hite Court and has two sons, both Guilderland graduates now in college. One will complete a doctorate in physical therapy this spring, and the other is studying sociology and psychology.

Asked if he supports the budget, Horan said, “It’s always amazing how we’re inching ever closer to that $100 million mark; we’re going to reach that in a couple of years.” He supports the budget, but said that he wished that the board could have access to more informative data earlier in the decision-making process, to avoid being “rushed into a decision.”

One example of an area where he felt the board could have used more information this year was in class sizes, which he says currently vary across the district from about 14 to more than 25. “That makes a big difference for the students,” he said.

As to which budget priorities he values most, “That’s tough,” he said, adding that all are important, “but you have to make decisions.”

Horan said that, for him, class size “is a huge issue that affects all students, K through 12.” Also important for him are offering electives and keeping technology up-to-date.

Horan said that he was “not a big fan of Common Core” when it was introduced, and he is still not. “The way it was rushed in and the way it was connected to that Race to the Top funding, it was kind of like a big blackmail scheme: ‘Do this or else.’” He said, “Something is very misguided and wrong with that.

“I always remember that John King, who was commissioner of education at the time, had this famous quote about, ‘We’re building the airplane while we’re flying it.’ That is not a comforting quote to hear from somebody who’s in a position of power. You want to have that airplane built and inspected and flight-ready, before you’re flying it.”

He added, “The time [that teachers have] for project-oriented activities has been stripped away over the years.”

One of the projects of which he is most proud, Horan said, is an apple orchard, called the Pomology Project, that he and other teachers planted near the front entrance of Pine Bush Elementary in 2001 to 2002.

“We did activities all year leading up to putting in these trees,” he said.

Other schools from across the district joined in activities related to the orchard. The 25-tree orchard is still thriving, and is used regularly by classrooms in every discipline, Horan said. Now that the snow is gone, he will take second-graders out there to “measure the tree branches, and the width of the trees and the height of the trees” he said, or to read aloud, or write. Art classes go there to draw, Horan said.  

“If you believe the happiness and well-being of children in the classroom to be a priority, and I would believe that to be a priority, then all of the testing we’re doing right now flies right in the face of that — not to mention all the preparation that goes into it, because these aren’t tests that you can just give. The kids have to know the format, the expectations, the timing. When you’re doing that for maybe three days during a test week, up to two hours a day, something’s very wrong with the system.”

Horan was struck by how much time is lost to testing and preparation for testing while teaching, for the first time ever, second grade this year, in his final year in the classroom. It is not until third grade that students across the state take standardized tests — three days of English and three days of math testing.  

It was “liberating” this year, “to just be able to teach, and do reading, and do science, and do writing with the students” during test week, he said.

“Do you need testing? Absolutely,” Horan said. “But the amount that we have now — that ought to be looked at.”

About transgender bathrooms, Horan said that a lot of these decisions “end up being made for you, at the Supreme Court level, sometimes.”

He said that, while there is some leeway at the district level, a lot of decisions about this topic will be settled by federal or state law or by legal rulings.  

“The biggest thing is getting information,” he said. “I don’t pretend to know everything about this topic.”

Horan said that states’ rights are “extremely important,” and that “the writing is on the wall, clearly, that you will have these types of bathroom assignments — gender-neutral bathrooms — in different areas, public schools being one of them. So if that’s the ruling, then that’s the way it is.”

 

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Sean Maguire

 

 

GUILDERLAND — Sean Maguire is the director of Economic Development for the Capital District Regional Planning Commission. He manages the region’s foreign trade zone and the region’s economic development district. His responsibilities include tracking and analyzing developments in the Capital Region related to, for example, demographics, population, housing, employment rates, and taxes, he said, and supplying this information to organizations such as the Center for Economic Growth, Empire State Development, and local Industrial Development Agencies.

Maguire, 39, grew up in Albany, where he attended Albany High School, and has lived in Guilderland for 15 years. He and his wife, Amie, have two children, Emily, who is in third grade at Guilderland Elementary, and Jack, in pre-kindergarten. The family lives on Hiawatha Drive.

He is a former volunteer firefighter with the Westmere Fire Department and has been a fire commissioner. He is still a member, and helps out with fundraising, he said.

Two years ago, he told The Enterprise, he decided not to run again as a fire commissioner. He wanted to do something that would have “more of a direct impact on my kids,” he said, and tried coaching soccer for both children for a time, but “missed the public-service aspect of it.”

From the macro level, he says, Maguire is happy with where the budget is this year.

“I was initially a little disappointed,” he said, “to see the district at least propose to cut the funding to stabilize the cobblestone schoolhouse.” He was glad to see that, when more state aid than originally expected came in, that funding was restored to the budget. It would have been “a real shame to continue to let that deteriorate,” Maguire said.

He was happy, he said, to see the board find partnerships, “like they did with Albany Med to replace the football scoreboard.”

Albany Medical Center has committed to paying $15,000 for a new electronic scoreboard. Board President Christine Hayes is of counsel to Albany Medical Center.

About the survey that the district conducted, Maguire said he was “a little surprised and alarmed to see the level of concern about safety” expressed by both parents and students; both groups ranked “safe, secure buildings” and “safe, efficient transportation” as top budget priorities.

“At the last bond vote, voters approved construction of a lot of new safety features,” Maguire said.

Referring to those survey results, Maguire said, “I don’t know if people think more needs to be done, or if the right stuff has already been done.”

He noted that, when he dropped off his petition at the district offices last week, the high school was holding a safety drill, and, he said, “They wouldn’t let me proceed any further when the students were outside,” which he thought was a sign of good policies and procedures.

A couple of parents have spoken to him about safe transportation, he said; one mentioned that on Route 20 cars still pass stopped school buses. “That may be as simple as doing more targeted enforcement with the police department,” he said.

Electives are “certainly important,” he said.

He would assign top priority to meeting the core educational needs of students, which he said includes “support for struggling students” and “support for students’ emotional/social growth.”

While serving on the Building Cabinet at Guilderland Elementary School — a school committee made up of teachers, staff, and parents — a couple of years ago, Maguire said, he learned a lot from teachers about Common Core. He said that teachers told him that the concepts behind Common Core are difficult for people to understand. In his opinion, testing is “on the heavy side,” he said, especially having recently seen his third-grade daughter undergo several days of standardized tests in English.

“We didn’t opt her out,” he said, “but we let her know the tests are just a way of knowing how well a school is doing, and don’t have any effect on her future.”

Maguire said that he supports having gender-neutral bathrooms in the schools. “First,” he said, “the idea that they are gender-specific is a waste of resources from an economic standpoint.”

The current use is a better use of the spaces, he said, and shows that the district recognizes and respects the idea that people are different.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” he said.

 

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Christopher McManus

 

 

GUILDERLAND — Christopher McManus, currently in his first term and the school board’s vice president, says that he has a unique vision as a parent of two children in elementary school. And as someone who has worked for the state’s Division of the Budget for almost 15 years, he says, he knows how to put a budget together.

“I think it’s important,” he said, “that there are people on the board who ask the tough questions and understand the budget and fiscal issues.”

McManus, 40, works as a principal analyst at the state’s Division of the Budget. He is a section head, responsible, he said, for certain tax issues and gaming issues, and handles forecasting, drafting legislation, and budget negotiations related to those issues.

McManus’s wife, Ann-Marie McManus, is an assistant principal at Guilderland High School. The couple lives on Twenty West Drive with two sons — one in fourth grade and one in kindergarten — at Lynnwood Elementary School.

Looking back over his time on the board to date, McManus says that, when he first joined, “that unfortunate study” came out, referring to a consultant’s analysis on what to do about excess space due to declining enrollment across the district; the report concluded with six “scenarios,” five of which were to close an elementary school.

“They were talking about closing a school, and a lot of people were upset, and I really thought that was the wrong approach. I was really proud that we were able to turn it around, and actually make it into a positive,” McManus said. Empty rooms have since been rented to a preschool program.

He recalled, “We really brought the community together and talked about, “What does Guilderland value, and what can we do with the extra space? Closing a school does not meet our values, but what can we do instead?” And that was when we talked about pre-K, and I was part of those committees to bring pre-K and talk about what use of the space we can go forward with. That really woke me up to the need to involve the community more.”

McManus, as vice president, and Christine Hayes, as president, have worked to bring the community into the process of making decisions, McManus said. The board has made a point of discussing things “out in the open” and encouraging people to come and discuss matters with them, he said.

McManus is also proud of the questions he asks, he said, noting that he often asks for more detailed information on matters before the board. He tries to ask questions “like a parent would,” he said, “and really try to understand why certain decisions are made.”

When he first joined, he said, there was no one else on the board who had children as young as elementary-school age. Having young children whose lives will be affected by the board’s decisions makes the work of the board that much more directly relevant, he said.

He supports the proposed budget, but wishes that the board had not gotten so “bogged down on one issue” — the cobblestone schoolhouse — when there were “a lot more issues that will impact kids in the future.”

As examples of items he would have liked to discuss more, he cited enrichment and the question of how many occupational therapy assistants the district needed.

Because of the amount of time devoted to the issue of the cobblestone schoolhouse, McManus says, “I think we missed an opportunity.”

About the survey, McManus said, “Obviously we have to have a safe school environment.” He said that making sure the district offers interesting and challenging classes to students is a priority, as is inclusion of all students. Inclusion “has been a priority for the last few years,” and will continue to be, he said.

McManus thinks it will be important for the district, going forward, to figure out how to retain bus drivers, and particularly the best bus drivers, at Guilderland. The expectation for all bus drivers, he said, should be that they drive kids to school safely, are reliable and not late or absent, and that they act in a professional manner.

Common Core, he says, was rolled out poorly, without a lot of buy-in from parents.

Looking at his children’s homework, he sometimes wonders why children are being taught such elaborate ways to solve problems. He wishes, in general, that more explanation could be given to parents along with homework, explaining not only how to do the homework but the reasoning behind the sometimes unfamiliar methods, such as, “If we go through all these steps, they’ll be likely to do well later in theoretical math.”

He said it seems problematic that parents sometimes find themselves unable to figure out how to do the homework being assigned to even young children.

That kind of complaint, he said, speaks to the need to have parents on the school board.

McManus thought that the students who came to the school board a year or so ago to say that they were not comfortable with using restrooms marked either “Girls” or “Boys” had “asked for something reasonable.”

There were bathrooms throughout the school that were single-stall, and he asked, rhetorically, why those couldn’t be made into gender-neutral facilities.

“That to me seems very logical,” McManus said, “and I thought it was a reasonable ask.”

He said, “You want any child to feel comfortable at school.”

 

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Judy Slack

 

 

GUILDERLAND — Judy Slack, who is serving her third term on the board, says that she supports the proposed budget “because the community is looking for us to provide the best education that the community can afford.”

“The budget,” she said, “is the result of the best efforts of the board of education, the district office team, the schools and principals, and the community.”

Slack retired in 2008 after working for 24 years as a teaching assistant at Lynnwood Elementary School. She was elected to the board in May of that same year and started in July.

Asked if there was anything else she would have liked to have seen go into the budget, Slack said, “There’s always more that you’d like to do for the students.” She would have liked to have seen more teaching-assistant positions added to the budget, she said.

“But then when they said that they had had money in the budget last year [for teaching assistants] and couldn’t find people, it’s hard to say,” she said.

When asked what items from the recent survey she considers the highest priority, Slack said she knows that the community said that safety was paramount, but added, “I really think over the last few years the safety of the schools is being quite well met.”

She would like to see more enrichment programs and more support for struggling students.

“It’s important that we have people there to support students,” she said, “including social workers, physical therapists, and other kinds of staff, so that students who are struggling — whatever their struggles are — can get on with the business of learning.”

Slack, 72, would like to see the long-defunct program of foreign-language education in the elementary schools reinstated. “It would be wonderful if we could get back to that. That’s sort of a dream. We might never be able to,” she said. “I think it was my first year on the board, or my second, that that was finally cut, and it was such a hard decision.”

It was Slack’s daughter, Julie, a sixth-grader at the time, who first got her mother interested in the school board. It was 1986, and teachers had been working without a contract; they had implemented a work-to-rule policy in which they refused to stay after school and supervise clubs or other activities.

One day, Julie told Slack that she wanted to go to the school board meeting that night and “present the views of the sixth-graders” about the work-to-rule. Slack thought, “If she was saying she wanted to go, I better start going to meetings.” From that point, she started attending about 95 percent of the board’s meetings, Slack said.

Slack had first worked as a high-school English teacher, in Troy and Berne-Knox-Westerlo, and then taken time off while her three children were young. “I have always had a great love for children and for teaching,” she said.

When she went back to work, once her youngest child entered the first grade, it was as a teaching assistant, rather than as a classroom teacher.

“I didn’t feel I could be a full-time teacher and a full-time mother,” she said.

She worked at Lynnwood as a teaching assistant in math for 24  years.

“I love being part of the educational system,” Slack says. “As soon as I retired, I joined the board.”

Slack now volunteers at Lynnwood three morning a week, helping in the fourth-grade math program.

She and her husband, Joe, who is a retired engineer and handyman, live on Leesome Lane in Altamont. (“Joe built our house himself, many years ago,” Slack added).

About Common Core, Slack said that she felt that the program’s implementation was “terrible.” In the beginning, she said, it was hard for fourth-graders, who were unfamiliar with the language. Students now, on the other hand, have heard the language of Common Core all along and “they get it.”

Slack went to several meetings about the program, and had a friend of hers who helped develop the math part, she said; that friend explained to her that the first part of the Common Core math education focuses on understanding how numbers relate to one another, since that will make it possible to master broader concepts later.

She said she understands that it’s frustrating for parents, who have never seen math taught this way. But she’s also disappointed that some parents are having kids opt out, she said. In most cases, she believes, parents are more stressed out by testing than the kids are.

“We all went through testing,” she said, referring to the standardized tests given in elementary school decades ago.

About the bathrooms issue, Slack said, “It can’t be easy to be a transgender kid, or whatever doesn’t fit the norm of society. Whatever we can do to support these students, so that whatever those issues are don’t get in the way of their learning, or their acceptance, is what we should be doing.”

The happiness that those students felt at having a bathroom that met their needs was “wonderful,” Slack said.

The board has an obligation, she believes, to do whatever it can to create an environment in which all students can feel comfortable and can learn.

As an incumbent, the one thing she is proudest of from throughout her time on the board is the hiring — “It was many years ago” — of Marie Wiles as superintendent.

“I think that Superintendent Wiles has made a huge difference for our district, and I’m proud to have been part of that decision,” she said.

“She’s a strong leader,” Slack said of Wiles. “She listens well to people, makes good decisions, and is willing to stand by them.”

“That, and concern for children,” she continued. “That is something I’m always proud of.”

 

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Allan Simpson

 

 

GUILDERLAND — Allan Simpson says he is running again for the Board of Education “because it’s a good thing to do, and I enjoy my service to the community.”

Simpson, an accountant, moved to Guilderland in 1999 to work for the New York State Insurance Fund, where he is the director of accounting and finance. His wife, Renate Simpson, is a teaching assistant at Guilderland High School, working with students with special needs. The couple lives on Concord Hill Drive and raised two children, both of whom graduated from Guilderland High School.

Simpson has served on the school board for seven years, having been elected to a one-year term in 2010, after coming in fourth in a six-way race, before being re-elected in 2011. He has served as the board’s president and vice president.

Asked what he is proudest of, Simpson said he’s proud of “being someone who is not afraid to ask questions and challenge the authority of what’s going on, to make sure the public has a good sense of what the school’s doing, what it’s spending its money on.”

He added that he is “also proud of the fact that we have a great school system, and I hope we’re able to maintain our good standing as a good school system.”

As to the proposed budget, Simpson said, “I support the spending part of it.” He also said, “I don’t support raising taxes.”

Simpson was the only one of the nine board members who voted “no” on the adoption of the budget.

Simpson explained why, saying that, rather than add to the district’s reserves, it would have been better to focus on not raising taxes at all. He said that in previous years, when “times were tough,” the school district “did a good job of keeping taxes at a minimum,” and the community was very supportive of that. Now, he said, he thinks it’s time that the school district reward the community for being so supportive, by refraining from raising taxes.

He said he thought that the district could spend the same amount of money in the 2017-18 budget, with no tax increase. “That’s why I voted no,” he said.

In Simpson’s view, “The spending plan that we have, we could spend that money without increasing taxes.”

This could be done, he said, by taking the monies not used last year and rolling them over into the 2017-18 budget.

“I don’t believe we need to build our reserves any more,” Simpson said.

He explained, “Last year, we increased our taxes, and at the same time, prior to that, we had approximately $2 million where we were underspent in budget. We don’t take into consideration our actual expenditures.”

Simpson said it is a flaw of government institutions in general that they work budget-to-budget, basing each new budget on the previous year’s budget, rather than on the previous year’s actual expenditures. “If you don’t take those things into account, then you’re constantly going to build a budget that’s bigger than you need,” he said.

“Corporations don’t do that,” he continued. “They’re held accountable for what they actually spend.”

About the cobblestone schoolhouse, he said, ”On a $92 million budget,” he said, “it would get lost in rounding.”

“Everybody was making a big deal over something that minute,” he said. “It boggles my brain. A $30,000 expenditure, and everybody was having heartburn over it.”

Simpson is a “big fan of zero-based budgeting,” he said. “If you spent $10 last year, and you budgeted $20, you wouldn’t create next year’s budget out of $20. You’d say, ‘OK, I spent $10. Let’s zero-base it up.”

As to priorities, Simpson said, “I think every kid should have a well-rounded education, and it should include a robust learning plan; it should include some arts, some athletics; it should include music. Everybody excels at different things. We should be able to, and we do right now, provide a great variety of programs that benefit almost all students in the community, including the students that have special needs. I think we do a very good job of trying to include them in the everyday classroom, and that’s been a focus over the past year, and I believe it will continue to be a focus going forward.”

Simpson declined to give an opinion on Common Core, saying, “I’m not an educator, so I don’t know how I could with any accuracy comment on something that. It would be like me commenting on brain surgery.”

Simpson supports the decision to create some gender-neutral bathrooms. “We live in a very dynamic society, and I think you have to be willing to adapt to the environment you’re in. I think that, as a school district, by converting those bathrooms into non-gender-specific bathrooms, shows our willingness to meet the needs of our students and our community. I support that. You have to be able to be flexible with what’s going on. You have to be conscious of what other people’s feelings and beliefs are.”