Bedford School Board Election Coverage: Q & A With Mark Chernis

This is the first in a series about the upcoming school board election and budget vote on May 17. We'll also provide a candidate Q & A with Eric Karle, who is running unopposed, and with Richard Hooker. We'll post a voter's guide just before the election, summarizing the issues, the candidates and how and when to vote.

Mark Chernis, 44, lives in Bedford Corners and is completing his second full term as a board of education member. He currently serves as president and chief operating officer of SchoolNet, a a provider of instructional improvements systems to very large school districts across the country. Prior to that position, he served as the president and chief operating officer of the Princeton Review, where he was employed for 24 years. Chernis has two children who attend West Patent Elementary School.

Patch: Why did you decide to run again?

Chernis:  It’s very simple—my children. They only get to go to school once. Their second and the third grade experience is the only one that they are going to have and anything I can do to make Bedford schools better, I want to do it. I want to make the district better for my kids and the kids in the community. It’s important to me that schools are exceptional. I've worked around school districts for my entire professional career, with state level educators and policy makers, and literally hundreds of school district administrators and leaders. I know what good schools look like and understand finances. Plus, I enjoy the work!

Patch: Why do you believe people should vote for you?

Chernis: Because of my professional career and the connections I have had with so many school districts, I’ve had the opportunity to see the things that work and the things that don’t work. There are a lot of new things coming down the road in the next three or four years that this district will have to develop policy for, like common core standards and the new teacher performance evaluation system. There are good ways to implement programs and there are bad ways to implement programs and I think all of the changes are going to have financial consequences that the district is going to have to steer through. I think one of the things I bring to the table is I know how other school districts are dealing with these issues and I can point out the good things they are doing. In the last three years, the finance committee, which I chair, has done a better job of being transparent and keeping the tax levy under control, and I'm proud of that. I also helped in the search for Dr. Hochman who is a great leader.

Patch: How important is continuity for the board?

Chernis: I think it’s about having the right mix of membership. I don’t think the school board would be well served to have seven new board members or seven three-term board members. The majority of our school board, four out of seven members, are serving their first full terms this year. That's four new folks with new ideas and a fresh set of ideas—at the the same time, you have three folks who have been around awhile and who have legacy knowledge that can help us avoid rookie mistakes.

Patch: What do you believe are the biggest issues facing the Bedford school district?

Chernis: I don’t think there is one specific issue. There are a lot of changes coming down the road and there is also a need to manage within a challenging financial environment. The administration working with the board has developed a much longer term outlook to finance and the implementation of new programs. This budget cycle was less eventful than previous cycles and, almost, made it look easy. The reason it wasn’t as eventful this year is because the planning and the work that has been done in previous years made this year go more smoothly.

If you look at all of the budget-to-budget increases, all of the increased costs are coming from the pension plan and the health care benefits. While it’s our districts and we need to take responsibility, it’s very difficult to fix these kinds of problems without help from Albany. But, until we get relief, we need to look new ways to become more efficient and new ways to stem internal cost increases. We need to keep our expenses as low as possible.

Patch: Given some of the topics that arose in the district's ", what makes the most sense to you as an issue to address as a school board?

Chernis: That session was so useful to the board because we learned what are the kinds of issues that are important to the public—what are acceptable increases, what are the hot button you want to stay away from. So I see that not so much as a to-do list but as a guide for long-term planning, which the district is now in a position to focus on. Those issues are all fair game. Now that things are stable and we have a good team under Jere Hochman, we can look a little further out.

Patch: Given the talk of a proposed annual cap on property tax increases, in relation to state mandates such as employee pension contributions, would you be willing to go with a cap that does not address the mandates, or do you believe tackling both at once are needed?

Chernis: I would answer that by looking through the lens of retaining as much local control of our district as possible. If I look at districts like ours, which are largely locally funded and have highly involved parents, the largest challege we face as a district is retaining the ability to chart our own destiny. When there is tremendous pressure put on the district from Albany, districts like ours can lose their abity to make their own decisions. I believe we need to be able to elect our own board, hire great superintendents and teams, and let the teams run the districts. So this applies for merit pay, teacher tenure and tax caps. I understand the financial benefit of tax caps, but I’d like that decision to be left to the community and not to Albany.

Patch: Do you support repealing the Triborough Amendment that keeps terms of expired union contracts in place until new agreements are reached? Would you support changing the state's pension systems for teachers and other public employees? If so, what type of changes would you want to see?

Chernis: Again, my answer is aligned with with the overall goal of giving the local districts control. There needs to be a way to put everything on the table. I'd like to see us be able to discuss ways to change how we handle pay and pensions without being hamstrung by Albany. After all, we don’t get a lot of state aid. Ninety percent of our money comes from the local community but we don’t have 90 percent of the control.

Patch: How do you think spending of reserves to lower the tax levy should be handled in future school years? Do you believe there needs to be a reduction in use, or keep them roughly the same as now?

Chernis: We have done a really good job of communicating all of these issues, we have transparency and post all finance related information on our website and hold public forums to discuss finances. We need to do more to explain to people how the reserves are decided, what the math is and we are working on a policy for that. Aside from the four percent of the fund balance the district is able to use annually to help the tax levy, I think the rest of the reserves need to be tightly constrained and used for very specific purposes—the repair reserves should not be used to keep taxes in check but to fix things when they break.

Patch: What is your position on the current "last in, first out" system in place that gives priority to retaining teachers with more seniority, in situations of job cuts?

Chernis: This goes back to local control, and I'm not sure the local unions would be allowed to change things without the support of state union representatives. Though we sit down at the table with local union members, they have boundaries set by state unions.  

Patch: Good luck!