Nanuet educator runs for state post
Copyright, The Journal News
Former school board chief only candidate for group’s top job
Randi Weiner
The Journal News
Anne Byrne is leaving the presidency of her local school board and heading into the leadership post of its statewide umbrella organization.
Byrne, a longtime member of the Nanuet Board of Education and its outgoing president, is the president-designate of the New York State School Boards Association, running unopposed for the top spot in the statewide organization where she has been a co-vice president for two years. The election will be held at the association’s convention in October.
“We would expect that Anne’s nomination will be very well received by the delegates,” said David Ernst, director of communications and research for the School Boards Association. “She’s a former recipient of the NYSSBA distinguished service award, which is in effect a school board member of the year award. Her dedication to school boards and children is well-known around the state.”
NYSSBA serves as an educational and advocacy organization for 700 school boards in 13 districts composed of about 5,500 school board members. In 2002, Byrne was elected one of two vice presidents of the state School Boards Association. Traditionally, the vice president becomes the organization’s president, and since co-Vice President Harris Dinkoff is retiring from his Nassau County — District 11 — leadership post this year, Byrne is the only candidate for the slot.
The 61-year-old Byrne, whose three children all graduated from Nanuet schools, said she got involved with education when her oldest child was in kindergarten. She was a room mother for her children while they were in elementary school, joined the PTA early and ran for school board when her youngest child was 3 and her older ones were in third and fourth grades.
“You move into a new neighborhood, you really don’t know a lot of people,” Byrne said. “It was a really good way of getting involved in the school and really get to know the school, the staff, the principal and other parents.
“I knew after a couple of years on the PTA that the decisions to make the school district better were happening at the board level,” she said. “The one way to make sure the district remained excellent was to get on the board. I love being a school board member. It’s exciting and very stimulating. You learn something new every day.”
Byrne was elected to the Nanuet school board in 1981 and has been a board member ever since. She has been Nanuet school board president three times, the most recent stint officially ending last night. Her current school board term will continue for two years.
“I think it’s a well-deserved title that she’s getting,” Nanuet schools spokeswoman Jo Cavaliere said. “She’s just a hard worker, very, very interested in the schools and the welfare of the children. The School Boards Association is lucky to have her as its incoming president.”
About a dozen years ago, state aid was cut drastically to local districts, and Byrne and several other education activists in the area created the Lower Hudson Education Coalition — referred to as the Nine County Coalition — as a way to get people from the New York City metropolitan area together to lobby for more state money.
The lobbying was successful, and Byrne made strong connections with educators throughout the area. When the New York State School Boards Association Area District 10 seat became vacant in 1997, Byrne ran unopposed for the spot. District 10 includes school boards in Rockland, Westchester and Putnam.
“The main purpose of NYSSBA is information,” Byrne said. NYSSBA keeps school board members up-to-date on educational concerns, passing on what’s happening in Albany with the Governor’s Office, the Legislature and the state Education Department. NYSSBA also holds numerous workshops for school board members to explain how a school board works and to train school board members in everything from contract negotiations to implementing standardized testing.
NYSSBA also acts as an advocacy group on behalf of school districts, school boards and children. To that end, the group lobbied state legislators to restore school funding originally cut by Gov. George Pataki in January. In a move applauded by educators across the state, the Legislature overturned the governor’s veto of additional school funding.
Byrne said that one of her goals for her upcoming two-year term as president is to foster a better relationship between NYSSBA and the Governor’s Office.
Each incoming president creates a theme. Byrne said she is still formulating hers. She knows she wants to concentrate on leadership, excellence and children. She said she planned to be a hands-on president, visiting all of the state’s NYSSBA districts in the coming year.
Byrne said the state is facing some difficult times in the next few years.
She expressed concern over the standardized testing problems with the math A and physics Regents exams this year, and the continuing low scores at the eighth-grade level. Current tests do not seem to be either diagnostic or predictive, she said. They cannot tell where a child needs specific help, and they are not good indicators of whether a child will do well in middle or high school.
She also was not in favor of using only one test that would determine whether a child passes a course and graduates from high school. High school students must pass five Regents tests in order to get a diploma, a procedure that became a problem this year when only about a third of the students who took the required math A test passed, throwing graduation into doubt for an estimated 3,000 seniors until the Board of Regents decided to toss the results.
“I think you have to examine whether or not the exams really show whether a child has learned the curriculum,” she said. “All those Regents exams — they have got to be accurate and reliable or we’ll lose our faith.”
She said that funding would be a concern next year, as well as getting inner-city children equal to their suburban peers educationally.
In addition, instituting the federal No Child Left Behind law that mandates, among other programs, standardized testing for every child enrolled in third through eighth grade, will be a herculean task.
“I think that’s going to be a huge challenge,” she said.
Reach Randi Weiner at rweiner@thejournalnews.com or 845-578-2468.