Meet The Candidate: Naomi Oppmann

Naomi Oppmann is a first time school board candidate who will take on Jason Schechter for one of two open seats on the Harrison School Board. Abby Mendelsohn will be running for the other seat unopposed. Voting will take place on May 18.

Harrison Patch: Why did you decide to run for the school board?

Naomi Oppmann: "I think that I bring different ideas, outside ideas, I'm not in the same homogeneous group and I think I can bring something to the table."

Harrison Patch: What kind of ideas would you bring to the district if elected?

Oppmann: "Obviously you have seven people on the board, so you can bring your ideas to the board but you have got to get the board to agree with that. But I do have some ideas, some of them are very good, and I do think that we need try and get more ideas from people because I think people have some good ideas out there."

Harrison Patch: Can you outline a few of them?

Oppmann: "I would like to see more people get involved in the school district because I think that if you get more people involved you will get more mentoring opportunities and more participation from people that live within the district. What I mean by that is that a lot of people move into Harrison, they have young kids, and they move here for the schools. But because their kids are, lets say two or three years old, they don't really know anybody and they don't know anything about the school except for what they've read and I think maybe the school needs to create a facebook group."

"Another thing, maybe create an adult education program like the ones other districts like Bronxeville, Scarsdale and Larchmont have. This way you have people that are not in the school district again to come in and get involved in the school."

"I think we need to save money, go green, do an energy audit, replace the lights with energy efficient light bulbs."

"Also, we happen to have a bunch of corporations that are within Harrison and I think we need to develop relationships with these companies so that we can get volunteer opportunities out of them. Also many large companies have foundations that benefit children."

"I also think we need to be more transparent. If you go to other school districts, for example Mamaroneck, you go onto their web site they have a huge amount of data on their web site and I think we need to give people that information instead of hiding it."

"I think we really do need to give the taxpayer more information so that they understand what's involved, what the process is, what the limitations are. Because a lot of the problems facing school districts, unfortunately, the school district didn't create, a lot of them are created in Albany."

"I think there are things that we can do and I think that there are things that we need to look at and I think that I have new ideas."

Harrison Patch: So you would say that more transparency within the district is one of the biggest things that you are trying to touch on?

Oppmann: "I think transparency is a huge thing, because if you have transparency you explain things to the public and you have it there so that they can see it, that's going to make the school budget easier to pass. You've got to get buy-in from the public and the public's not buying into the school budget."

Harrison Patch: Was running for school board something you considered for a long time?

Oppmann: "I like to be involved and I think that involvement in the community is very important. I've done a lot of work with children and been involved with a lot of programs."

Oppmann also mentioned that she is concerned with the high cost of education per student in Harrison in comparison to other districts in the area and property tax increases. For more on the candidate, visit her Web site.

Oppmann, along with the other candidates, will publicly answer questions Tuesday during an event at L.M.K Middle School.