Two townships, one shared school district, and four fresh faces vying for positions on the West Windsor-Plainsboro Board of Education. In Plainsboro there are two seats being contested. Current board member Todd Hochman will not seek re-election. Meanwhile Tony Fleres, chairman of the board’s finance committee and the other Plainsboro board member whose term expires this year, will seek his third term on the board.
The newcomers are Quentin Walsh, a well known critic of some of the board’s financial policies and the husband of current board member Ellen Walsh (whose term expires next year), and Yibao Xu, a professor of mathematics at Manhattan Community College in New York.
In West Windsor John Farrell, who was originally appointed in 2008 to fill the seat vacated by Stan Katz, has decided not to seek another term. The seat is being sought by Michele Kaish, a resident of the township for the past 18 years, and by Peter Abitanto, senior vice president with an insurance brokerage that manages employee benefits for more than 285 school districts throughout New Jersey. Following are snapshots of the five candidates, beginning in Plainsboro:
#b#Tony Fleres#/b#. With John Farrell and Todd Hochman deciding not to run, the lone incumbent school board candidate this year is Tony Fleres of Mifflin Court in Plainsboro. Fleres currently serves as chairman of the board of education’s finance committee. Fleres was originally elected in 2006 and he is seeking his third term on the board.
Fleres and his wife Marcia, executive director of the WW-P Education Foundation, have lived in Plainsboro since 1993. The couple moved from Old Bridge to Plainsboro because of the school district’s reputation. Their son, Mark, graduated from High School North last year and now attends Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. Fleres’ daughter Amanda is in her freshman year at High School South.
Fleres, whose father was a carpenter and mother a seamstress, works in New York as a design manager at URS Corporation. He holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the City College of New York, and in 1980 he earned his MBA from the University of Connecticut.
After six years on the board Fleres is aware of the learning curve that comes with a position on the school board “just as when you join any organization,” he says. Fleres feels that experience pays off as he fully understands the parameters the school board has to operate under and the financial management of the school budgeting process.
“After serving as chairman of the finance committee, I think I’m knowledgeable about maintaining our finances,” says Fleres (whose letter to the editor regarding the board’s budgeting practices appears on page 2 of this issue).
#b#Quentin Walsh#/b#. Walsh, the lone member of the public who attends Plainsboro Township Committee meetings, made a splash on Wednesday, February 22, when he announced his candidacy for school board at the committee’s business meeting. For the past several years Walsh has taken on the school budget, in particular the district’s yearly surplus, as his personal crusade.
Throughout December, January, and early February Walsh appeared at most West Windsor Council meetings to make public comments on the school budget and inform council members and the public of key dates in the district’s calendar, including the regularly scheduled meetings of the board’s finance committee. Walsh has also updated the Plainsboro Township Committee on the school board’s latest news and financial decisions over the years.
His next public appearance will be Thursday, March 8, from 7 to 9 p.m. at the West Windsor Republican Club. (See sidebar, page 13.)
The announcement at the February 22 township committee meeting topped off a monumental week for Walsh. He became a grandfather for the first time as Walsh’s son — who’s also named Quentin but prefers to go by “Q” — and his daughter-in-law welcomed their first child, Grace Ann Walsh, born on February 21. The new grandparents made a day trip to Richmond, Virginia, to visit the younger Walsh, who is stationed at the Fort Lee army base. Walsh’s son, now 25, attended West Point after graduating from High School South in 2004.
Walsh grew up in Williston Park in Nassau County, not far from where his daughter resides today. He attended Catholic schools including St. Mary’s High School in Manhasset. Walsh’s mother was a homemaker while his father was a newspaper reporter who worked for the New York Daily News from 1952 until his death in 1970.
Walsh met his future wife in 1978 while both were working at the International Paper Company, where Walsh was a senior financial analyst for more than four years. Coincidentally, at the time both he and Ellen were attending the Peter J. Tobin School of Business at St. John’s University in Queens. Quentin Walsh finished his MBA program at St. John’s in 1980, a year ahead of Ellen.
Walsh earned his bachelor’s degree in accounting from New York’s Fordham University in 1975. Meanwhile Ellen Walsh earned her bachelor’s in political science at Queens College prior to the MBA program. Walsh’s career started as an auditor at Arthur Andersen in 1975.
Walsh’s career spans four decades of financial reporting and problem-solving for major corporations, including Lord & Taylor, Tommy Hilfiger, and Playtex. Since last August Walsh has served as a consultant for Solomon Edwards Group, based in Wayne, PA. The job currently has Walsh working with one of the company’s clients in Parsippany.
While working with Playtex, the Walsh family lived in Dover, Delaware, for 12 years before Walsh had an opportunity to work in New York again. Several of their friends there had children in private school near Wilmington, but the Walshes believe in good public schools.
Other than schools, Walsh was set on being near the Northeast Corridor train line for commuting. With his daughter Meg an eighth grader and his son Quentin a sixth grader, the Walshes moved to Plainsboro in 1997.
Meg Walsh graduated in 2002 from South and earned her bachelor’s from Rowan University and an MBA from Rider. She currently works at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, NY.
With personal ties to the armed forces, Quentin Walsh has dedicated some of his efforts to helping military families. Since 2008 Walsh has served as a board member for the Lieutenant Dennis W. Zillinski Memorial Fund, honoring a soldier killed in Iraq in 2005 by supporting active duty military and their families.
Walsh’s signature ending line when he makes public comments is to state that the views he shared were his own and not those of his wife, Ellen Walsh, as she is a member of the school board. When asked why he does this on every occasion, Walsh jokes that he’s been married too many years to try to talk about his wife’s views.
But the couple is in agreement on many things pertaining to the school district, he says. There were driving factors that led one to the school board and the other to run this year. For Quentin it’s the budget; for Ellen it was facilities. The two aspects intertwined as each one considered the growth of WW-P in their time here.
According to Quentin Walsh, in the late 1990s when the district was expanding and building new facilities to accommodate its growth, Ellen Walsh saw both her children attend multiple schools and realized that the conditions of older buildings were not up to par. She took up that cause as a key to her campaign, and with her husband’s support Ellen Walsh worked her way from serving on the PTSA at High School South to becoming a board member in 2007.
Walsh was convinced to run this year as he says it represents a time for change on the board. “Being mindful of the tough times for taxpayers from West Windsor and Plainsboro is the first motive. Also, I feel that the board has chosen to ignore my comments.”
When examining the district’s operation,. Walsh believes that everything has an effective range. He says one of his biggest disappointments in New Jersey is that the state really hasn’t looked at school districts matched for their respective municipalities and asked the question “what’s the right size?”
Walsh says the state breaks districts down into K-6 with under and over 5,000 students and K-12 with under or over 5,000 students. With an enrollment of 9,840 this year, WW-P is on the highest end. Walsh estimated that about 120 other districts fall into the same category.
Reflecting on how WW-P has grown in his 15 years in the area, he says in some instances a district “gets too big to manage and the plan turns to start building for bureaucracy rather than for effectiveness.” This is his primary concern for WW-P’s future.
Walsh says the effectiveness in terms of performance and how kids progress needs to be further examined, just before the financial details.
“As a secondary thing, what’s the cost. I know not to look at a district’s budget as a cost accounting exercise and we’re not in a manufacturing plant making widgets. I recognize that,” he said.
Instead Walsh would first look at the district’s students “performance wise, quality wise and outcome wise to get an idea of what size school districts work.”
Walsh feels that there’s not enough transparency which affects the public’s awareness about the factors that play into a school district. Walsh says he will attempt to fill the void.
“There’s an absence of knowledge out there. When you say Princeton is a higher cost district than West Windsor-Plainsboro it’s a great statistic to put out there, but looking at the enrollment Princeton is about half the size of WW-P. In my mind, being an accountant for all these years and having been involved in corporate management, there’s got to be an economy of scale to a larger district,” Walsh says.
#b#Yibao Xu#/b#. A professor of mathematics at Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York, Xu has earned multiple awards and honors, including a research grant from CUNY’s community college collaborative for a 2004 project titled “Mathematicians in China and the cultural revolution.”
Xu grew up in China’s Jiangxi province and came to America in 1995 to pursue his Ph.D. studies at City University of New York. His Ph.D. is in the history of science, and he also has a bachelor’s in mathematics from Shangrao Teachers College in Jianxi province.
Xu’s mother was a homemaker and his father, who will turn 80 this year, worked as a miner. Jiangxi province has is China’s leader in mineral deposits of copper, tungsten, gold, silver, uranium, thorium, tantalum, and niobium.
Although Xu was married he lived alone for his first two years in New York as his wife, (Delia) Yongxian Yu, stayed behind in China with the couple’s first son, Jonathan. In China Dr. Xu’s wife worked in education as a professor of English literature.
In 1998 his wife and son came to the U.S. and the family settled in Queens. The couple later had a second child, Alex, who currently attends Town Center Elementary School. When Alex was born that prompted Xu to consider moving to an area that could offer his sons better educational opportunities.
Dr. Xu moved the family in the summer of 2007 so Alex could get off to a good start from an early age while Jonathan could get four full years at a highly rated public high school. Xu says fundamentals are key for educational development.
“I truly understand that education is very important for social mobilization and the benefit of the individual as well as the family. I believe elementary, K through 12 education is very important and it has a dramatic impact on later education. In fact, K-12 is more important than college. College is something that you can go through if you have time and resources later in life. But if you don’t get the elementary education right the first time around, there’s no going back,” he said.
Based on the recommendation of a family friend from Plainsboro as well as research Xu had done online, the family settled here in 2007. Dr. Xu gave up convenience to give his children better schooling.
“It was a tough decision — if I stayed in New York I would have saved so much time commuting as it takes up about four hours every day I go to the city,” he says. His wife would have had a shorter commute too, as she works in New York for a Chinese sleepwear company. Ironically, their son, Jonathan, is now living in New York as a pre-med student at New York University.
This semester Dr. Xu teaches classes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays while his wife commutes every single day. Although family time is precious, Xu is looking to contribute his time and efforts to the community — and his adopted country — by serving on the board of education.
The timing of Dr. Xu’s decision to run also had to do with his naturalization in 2009. He knew that it was not legally possible for him to be a candidate for a public office in America until that happened and he waited patiently, taking small steps along the way. Xu says he has been regularly involved as a parent by attending parent-teacher conferences and volunteering his time whenever possible. He is also active in Chinese cultural activities outside of school.
“Usually we have special festivals and put together art or music programs, including Chinese calligraphy,” Xu says.
Xu does not have a particular agenda he is running on. But “trying to limit the burden on taxpayers in the community is crucial, and we must keep a balance,” he says.
There is currently just one Asian-American member of the WW-P school board, President Hemant Marathe, but Xu is not intent on making the race about race. He does say that he hopes his run for school board will inspire more minorities to participate in their local community.
“With many of the Chinese-American personalities, they are very successful and have done very well in their own professions. They may feel they do their part of community service. Like me, when they first come to the U.S. they really don’t have much time as they need to finish their studies and make a living. But as people develop their lives here and with an increase in the Chinese-American population and Asian-Americans as a whole, I think we need to do our part as members of society,” he said (see letter, page 3).
