The Mineola school board will have a new member after district residents vote for one school board seat on Tuesday.
Hampton Street School PTA Co-President Cheryl Lampasona is running unopposed to replace current board Vice President Patricia Navarra, who is stepping down after her first three-year term to pursue a position with a national collective bargaining group for college professors.
Lampasona, 38, has said she wants to keep the district on the “cutting edge” while continuing the programs administrators have started, such as elementary school Spanish classes and the use of technology in classrooms.
“I think education, it’s a giant wave, like it’s always changing, so we always have to be on the new front of something,” Lampasona said in an interview last month.
Lampasona has worked as a full-time and part-time teacher for the past 12 years and currently teaches third grade in Woodside, Queens.
She has lived in the Mineola district for six years and is the mother of a Hampton Street School kindergartner and second-grader, she has said.
She would ascend to the board following the growth of Mineola’s movement of parents opting their children out of the controversial state tests aligned with Common Core educational standards.
Lampasona has said she thinks the standards are valuable and would not have opted her older child out of tests this year, but she thinks it is good that parents have a choice in the matter.
“What the kids are taking now, are they fair? No. They’re very difficult exams,” she said. “I just hope they’re being put to good measure and good use to further education, not hold something back.”
At a candidate forum last week, Lampasona said, she thinks the district is doing “wonderful things” with classroom technology and said she is excited to visit other schools and “see what we can do all together.”
Lampasona said there is a stark contrast in the resources available to New York City schools and those available in Mineola schools.
“I count my blessings that we can live where we live and not where I teach,” she said last week. “I am an excellent teacher, don’t mistake that.”
Mineola school district residents will cast ballots for the school board seat and the district’s 2016-2017 budget on May 17.
