The Mineola school board will likely see a shift in membership this June, with a newcomer running unopposed for Vice President Patricia Navarra’s soon-to-be-empty seat.
Hampton Street School PTA Co-President Cheryl Lampasona, 34, is the sole candidate to replace Navarra, a Hofstra University professor who is stepping down after one three-year term to pursue a position with a national collective bargaining group for college professors.
“I will miss working with my productive and generous board colleagues, (Mineola school Superintendent Michael) Nagler, our teachers and administrators,” Navarra wrote in a statement on Facebook. “Our collaboration has expanded Mineola school district into a world-class educational program with facilities poised for the 21st century, all while watching the tax dollar.”
Navarra is an adjunct associate writing professor at Hofstra University and the recording secretary for the school’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, the country’s largest faculty collective bargaining unit at a private university, she said.
She said she decided not to pursue re-election to the school board because she was nominated for a seat on the AAUP’s Collective Bargaining Congress, a national umbrella group that provides bargaining support to local faculty chapters.
Navarra was elected to the Mineola school board in 2013 and has lived in Williston Park since 1998. She served on the district’s consolidation committee and was previously president of the Mineola Middle School PTA and the District Council PTA.
Lampasona, a six-year resident of Mineola, teaches third grade in Woodside, Queens, and is the mother of a Hampton Street School kindergartner and second-grader.
As a member of the school board, she 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.
Lampasona said she has never sat on a board before and will “be in learning mode for a while” to understand things such as budgets and relevant law. But it is “exciting to learn something new,” she said.
Lampasona 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.
While she said she would not have opted her older child out of tests this year, Lampasona said she thinks it is good that parents have a choice in the matter.
The Common Core standards “had the right idea” by trying to create a baseline educational standard, she said, but New York’s rollout was “terrible” and she is not certain the state test results will be used to aid students’ progress.
“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.”
Lampasona has worked as a full-time and part-time teacher for the past 12 years. She holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Baruch College and a master’s degree in childhood education from Touro University.
She is in her second year as co-president of the Hampton Street School PTA and is also a den leader in Cub Scout Pack No. 246.
Mineola school district residents will cast ballots for the school board seat and the district’s 2016-2017 budget on May 17.
