Commentary: Candidates Forum -- Are there any incumbents on this school bus?

At times all five candidates talk as if they are running for the first time.

A debate among candidates running for political office, or, a more polite and collegial format such as the Forum held last evening with the five Croton-Harmon Board of Education candidates, is a fundamental exercise in democracy. But for it to fulfill that purpose, every prospective voter must have access to the event and be able to see and hear it.

It may seem odd for us to begin this Commentary with what might be to some a purely technical issue, but the very poor sound and visual quality of the remote broadcast of the Candidates Forum is actually a question of basic democracy—especially for those who are not able to attend such an event in person. The League of Women Voters, which as usual hosted the event, bears no responsibility for this problem. The district does. Anyone who has watched a Board of Education meeting remotely knows that the audiovisual quality is horrific and that nothing has been done so far to fix it.

We have inquired whether there are any plans to fix this but not heard back yet. With all of the tens of millions of dollars in its budget—proposed at $62,762,808 for the 2026-27 school year—the district has not yet made this a priority. The village of Croton-on-Hudson, on the other hand, just recently dramatically transformed the quality of its meeting broadcasts after years of complaints, which shows it can be done if there is a will to do it.

We hope that whoever is elected to the Board of Education this time around will put the consensus about the need for better communication with parents and the community into practice and make the meetings fully accessible to everyone.

So now let’s get into some observations about the Candidates Forum. The Chronicle does not endorse candidates for elected office, but we also like to provide honest commentary about what goes on in our community. None of what follows should be interpreted as favoring one or more candidates.

This year we have three incumbents fighting to hold onto their seats for another term, and two challengers who are running pretty strong campaigns. Yet from the tone of the campaign and the statements the candidates have made, one might think that none of them are incumbents at all.

To one degree or another, the five candidates have all distanced themselves from the Board’s previous record and certainly from the the superintendent, Stephen Walker. Sharp listeners will have noticed that “Walker” is the name that one not dare utter. There are vague references to “the superintendent,” a seemingly disembodied presence best left somewhere in the ether, lest any of the candidates get stuck with responsibility for his leadership.

Superintendent Stephen Walker

So the dividing line between incumbents and challengers has rather become a spectrum, which perhaps naturally progresses depending on how long one has been on the school board. On one end we have Neal Haber, with 28 years on the school board, with Sarah Carrier and her nine years on the board (and recent service as board president) next. As is clear from their campaign statements and literature, both are running to a large extent on their records.

On the other end, of course, are Jake Day and Elizabeth “Betsy” Laird, the clear challengers. They want to change a lot of things as all challengers do. And somewhere in the middle is Anamika Bhatnagar, with three years of tenure on the board, but often sounding like a challenger herself—sometimes to policies that she was identified with not so long ago.

Despite these tensions and differing perspectives, it’s important to note the differences between last year’s campaign and this year’s. Last year got pretty nasty at times, with smears against the two challengers (some mischaracterized them as MAGA Trump supporters) and other patently dishonest tactics.

This year, all five candidates signed onto a statement calling for a clean campaign, and for the most part it has been. We’ve heard about some isolated and outlandish claims that one of the challengers wants to remove books about LGBTQ people from the libraries and that sort of thing, but they have not taken hold and certainly not played any significant role in the campaign.

There were some very interesting moments during the Forum, however, which revealed some of the differences between the candidates. In response to a question about parents’ concerns about academic rigor, for example, Jake Day raised some issues about the district’s Vision Map, the guiding philosophy which Stephen Walker is closely identified with. Day cited a 2024 report by the Tri-State Consortium, a professional network of 60 public school districts in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, that functions as a group of “critical friends” to help districts engage in self-study accompanied by what might be called peer review.

Day stated that the consortium, while it was basically positive about the Vision Map, nevertheless found that the Map specified no predetermined outcomes and envisioned an “intentionally undefined future.” Day argued that the board should insist on regular reporting based on defined metrics, and suggested that the district should reassess the strategy. “Social emotional learning and rigor can be done compatibly,” he said.

This brought an immediate rebuttal by Neal Haber, who argued that the report, which he has read, came out in 2024 when the programs based on the Vision Map were still being developed, and at a time when it was normal to not yet have “timelines or metrics.” That brought yet another rebuttal from Betsy Laird, who cited her experience helping to manage a large non-profit organization to argue that “no strategy I have ever worked on has not defined success and metrics at the formative stage.”

The Tri-State Consortium’s report is worth looking at, because it is obvious from the mostly glowing review that district officials, teachers, staff, and even students, put on a good show for the visitors, as one might expect they would. Nevertheless, there is a large contingent of parents in our district who think, rightly or wrongly, that the strong emphasis on Social Emotional Learning has gone too far, and that academic rigor has suffered as a result.

At the end of the forum, Anamika Bhatnagar brought up the Vision Map again. “It’s great to have a vision but if it’s not going to be operationalized, if it’s not going to be evaluated… it’s not really much of a vision.”

Yet one thing that has come out of the election campaign, and was also in evidence at the earlier forum held on April 23 (which focused on technology issues), is that all five candidates do support a balancing of concern for the academic and career futures of our children—as measured by what colleges they get accepted to or other measures of success—with social emotional concerns (even if some put more emphasis on grades and test scores than others.

In our view, whatever criticisms might be made of the district’s performance in various areas, the emphasis on the integrity, autonomy, and happiness of our children can only be a good thing. No one wants to turn our kids into robots who have no real purpose in life other than making money.

Another flash point, if there was anything that could be called a flash point during this polite and collegial forum, came during a question about the unnamed superintendent of schools, and how he and the entire administration should be held accountable in the day to day management of the district.

Neal Haber and Sarah Carrier briefly discussed the superintendent’s annual evaluation as the primary way this is done. But Jake Day argued that the annual review has become increasingly qualitative rather than quantitative, with “no real hard numbers” about such things as how often administrators visit the classroom or meet with teachers.

Indeed, a sign that administrators might be out of touch at times came with the recent revelation that the bell-to-bell ban on cell phones was no longer being seriously enforced in the high school. And yet both Walker and the high school principal seemed to be unaware of that, or at least pretended to be in their comments to the Chronicle. Once the issue became public, enforcement stepped up again, although to a large extent the administration seems to have little desire nor will to enforce this district policy and New York state law.

Anamika Bhatnager, for her part, stated that over the past couple of years the board had held the superintendent to a higher degree of accountability, an achievement which she has taken some credit for in her campaign literature. Bhatnagar said that previously the superintendent was setting his own goals, but that more recently the process had become more collaborative, and that the evaluation process had become more public.

We must note, however, that, in the view of some parents, a low point in recent Board of Education oversight came in June of last year, when a proposed five year extension of Walker’s contract (along with a 14.6% salary increase) was essentially buried in the Board of Education’s agenda. Some sharp-eyed parents saw the item and showed up to plead with the board that it delay extending the contract until Walker had undergone a more thorough evaluation, but the board unanimously turned down that demand.

During that meeting, Anamika Bhatnager spoke the longest in Walker’s defense, praising him for being “extremely receptive” to parents and to the board, and adding that this represented “a huge change from the first two superintendents I interacted with when I first came to this district eleven years ago.”

The next to last question put to the candidates concerned the feelings expressed by many parents that the district is bad at communication, an issue that also played a central role in last year’s campaign and probably contributed to challenger Allison Samuels’ victory (she won far and away the most votes in that election.) Jake Day argued that the main issue is not so much communication, but how the district—the Board of Education and administrators—responds to questions and concerns put to them by parents.

Despite repeated claims by some board members that the district is responsive, many parents do not see it that way. Bhatnagar agreed in her own comments, arguing that the board needs “a policy on responding” and that “there’s a lot that isn’t working.” She added that when parents write to the district “they are advocating for a student,” that is, their own child. “We need to change the culture in this school district so that questions aren’t received as criticism or an attack,” Bhatnagar said.

Betsy Laird agreed. “When people bring up the same issues again and again it is a signal—it is not to be ignored.” Laird added a bit later, in response to a final question about what priorities the candidates would set if they won election, that she knows many parents who have asked well-intentioned questions and “gotten the wall shut in front of us.”

Here at the Chronicle we know how those parents feel. In the early days after this online newspaper began publishing, we were able to have cordial communications with board members and district staff, including Stephen Walker, and they provided comment and input into some of our early stories. But soon after we began to publish articles that included criticisms of the district, that communication shut down, and district officials adopted a quasi-official policy of “no comment” on every story we did (the district did continue to provide us with factual information, via the district clerk, but we were forced to file a lot of New York Freedom of Information Law requests to get some pretty basic information.)

So when it comes to communication and responsiveness, the Croton-Harmon Board of Education still has a long way to go. It is not surprising that for many district parents, those have emerged as major issues as they advocate for their children’s educations and their futures. We are not going to try to predict the outcome of this election, but no one should be surprised—as so many were last year—if such considerations end up playing a major role in who wins and who loses.

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