The 2025 Municipal Election, which is set to transpire on November 4, is fast approaching, and a significant position on the ballot is up for grabs: the role of School Board Director. There are nine spots on the Board of School Directors, with four four-year positions open for election within the current voting cycle.
On October 9, Harriton High School—on behalf of the Interschool Council, an LMSD organization promoting communication between parents and schools—hosted the eight candidates in a student-moderated forum. Present were incumbent Board members Dr. Kerry Sautner and Anna Shurak, as well as Omar Deckel, Juanita Kerber, Talia Nissim, Deena Pack, Jennifer Riviera, and Jacob Rudolph.
Although the forum was closed to audience interaction, all questions were submitted by “students, parents, taxpayers, and community groups,” according to Seth Ruderman, co-organizer with James Browning. The questions were “reviewed by the League of Women Voters for non-partisanship.” The thirteen total questions were distributed within six rounds and disseminated to the four student moderators: Harriton High School Debate presidents Levi Toikka `26 and Eden Weathers `26, as well as LM Debate presidents Medha Steingard `27 and Alistair Browning `26.
The evening was set to begin with “a one-minute opening statement, the order of which [had] been determined by a random drawing,” explained Alistair Browning. “After the opening statements, the candidates will proceed to answer six rounds of questions: five rounds will consist of two questions, while the final round will be a question.”
With four candidates answering each question, Steingard explained that each panelist had ninety seconds to respond. However, another candidate could hold up a yellow card to be included in answering specific questions, even if they were not chosen to respond, as long as each limited themselves to two usages.
Opening statements began with Jacob Rudolph, “an eighteen-year-old graduate of Harriton High School,” and the only candidate running as an independent. “These past four years,” emphasized Rudolph, “have not been good.”
In his speech, and throughout his campaign, Rudolph’s emphasis has been on preventing antisemitism, increasing responsiveness to students with disabilities—he himself had to “fight for years” to get his IEP needs met—and creating a district attitude of transparency. In fact, transparency marked a theme of the night, as the Q&A opened by Toikka with the question, “What is your understanding of a School Board Director’s role? As one of nine, in which ways would you, as a School Board Director, hold the superintendent and the administration accountable and ensure transparency?” Shurak, the first respondent, highlighted the need for “a steady level of discourse” within the Board, something she noted as difficult with the “level of transition” within the district. This is in reference to LM’s four-year phase of cycling superintendents—from Robert Copeland to Dr. Khalid Mumin to Dr. Steven Yanni to interim superintendent Dr. Larry Mussoline to current Superintendent Dr. Frank Ranelli.. Throughout Shurak’s responses was a clear message: fostering stability. “If Kerry and I are not reelected,” she pointed out in her closing remarks, “we will only have one person on the Board that has more than two years of experience.”
Pack refuted this, stressing that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing for twenty years and not making a change.” Pack, a local leader of a pediatric home health company, mother of three, and one of the three Republicans on the ballot, thinks the district should be run systematically—that the “quality assurance and performance improvement” used to run her company should be applied within district management. Her plan includes quarterly meetings, owning up to mistakes (“my bad, I’m going to fix it”), and implementing performance self-reports and goals.
Though running in the opposing party, Riviera’s planning standpoint was similar. As someone with twenty years of experience in financial oversight and strategic planning, Riviera’s priority was self-described as “financial and accountability in a meaningful and engaging way.”
Across the board was a nearly unanimous opinion on technology—no to phones for children, yes to AI updates. Candidate Omar Deckel runs an AI company, and his campaign is influenced by this: “Writing a policy today that can identify all the guardrails we can put into place is nearsighted. This has to be an ongoing thing to be able to consistently evaluate what AI can do and what it should do.” Many candidates also emphasized the utilization of AI as a tool for students with disabilities, allowing them to “catch up” to their peers.
Contrastingly, nearly all candidates believed in the harm of technology in the classroom and an effort to separate students from devices. Democratic candidate Juanita Kerber described her own priorities, expressing that “one of the things that I do when…my son gets home from school is to see what he’s going to [do], what he has to do, but also to make sure he’s turning screens off…to go outside and play with his friends.”
“Wait Until 8th” was a recurrent advertisement by many of the candidates, a pledge delaying giving smartphones to students until the end of eighth grade. Republican candidate Thalia Nissim expressed her exasperation towards allowances of “iPad time” in the classroom: “My son will come home and say, ‘Oh, I finished an assignment early, so my teacher told me to go play on my iPad, so I searched up which Apple Watch I might want.”’
However, not all issues were agreed on unanimously. A tense moment came when Kerber answered a question about hate speech, replying with, “When you have a group that seeks an endorsement from a PAC like 1776 Project, which doesn’t believe in [diversity, equity, and inclusion], that’s a problem for me, and that also dispels the transparency and trust that we want in our School Board.”
This is in relation to the Together For Tomorrow ticket—made up of the Republican candidates Pack, Deckel, and Nissim—who are endorsed by the 1776 Project, a PAC that supports “reform-minded conservatives who oppose political indoctrination,” according to their website. Rudolph, in turn, denounced the 1776 Project as well, clarifying, “I had to decline an endorsement from the 1776 Project because of hateful, inflammatory items on their website, such as hats saying there are only two genders. Those aren’t the values I was raised with. Those aren’t the values that our community has. We shouldn’t be bringing that rhetoric into the classroom, into the School Board.” And with those closing remarks, the forum was over.
Even with divisive moments such as these, a commitment to transparency, trust, and putting children first was emphasized by every candidate, whether running as a Democrat, a Republican, or an Independent, and the forum acted as a clear channel to respectfully express opinions to the community.
Watch the full ISC School Board Candidates Forum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bboItmUpBZM
