Seven candidates, including three incumbents, are vying for the most votes in this year’s school board election due to the expiration of the terms of board members Moira Lang, Eldred Harris, and Adam Krantweiss. Four individuals, Steve Cullen, Barry Derfel, Todd Fox, and Emily Workman, have announced they will challenge the current candidates for their seats on the board.
On May 21, voters will see a few items that have caused contention in the community on the ballot, including the newly proposed $168 million budget with an 8.42% increase in the tax levy from the 2023-24 budget. With both budgets well above the state-imposed tax cap, this budget contains a $4 million reduction in the tax levy from the initially proposed budget, which included a 12.14% increase in the tax levy.
This year, the Ithaca Teachers Association, which has called for voters to approve the budget, has chosen to endorse incumbents Adam Krantweiss and Moira Lang and challenger Emily Workman.
Prospective candidates had to submit a nominating petition by May 1, each with the signatures of at least 100 qualified voters within the district, to have their names on the ballot for the election.
The Ithaca Times spoke with each candidate about their values, beliefs, and hopes for how they can impact the future of the school district and board.
Eldred V. Harris, J.D.
Incumbent candidate Eldred Harris first came to the board in 2009 after noticing the district’s inequity of education for marginalized students. He cited that when he first ran, the district had a significantly lower graduation rate for African American students and students with IEPs.
If re-elected, Harris would serve his seventh term on the board. He is the chair of the finance committee, a member of the curriculum committee, and the board liaison to Beverly J. Martin Elementary. He played an integral role in establishing ICSD’s equity report card.
Harris is a graduate of Cornell Law School and a “serial entrepreneur,” founding four businesses, including the Entrepreneurship Leadership Business Development Lab (eLab) and Diaspora Gallery.
Harris’ stance on equitable education for all students intersects with his defense of this year’s controversial budget in many recent board meetings. He has noted that when the cost of living goes up for taxpayers, the cost to keep schools open while providing the necessary resources to children also increases.
“Public schools serve a variety of critical functions,” Harris said. “The primary being to keep the equity and values of our community high, and this is an interesting moment in our time. [...] Folks seem to be interested in diminishing the budget, and I’m not quite sure where that will leave this district in terms of being a public school that allows excellence for all of its students.”
Harris said he has decided to run for reelection to continue striving for academic excellence and equity for all students within the district while maintaining a salary for teachers that represents their importance to the student’s education. He wishes to continue advocating for policy change in Albany that would improve functions within the district.
“Equity has a cost,” Harris said. “In the same way that promoting a particular type of excellence has a cost to this community.”
Adam Krantweiss, Ph.D.
Krantweiss was first elected to the board in 2023, filling an open seat for a one-year term. He is a self-employed clinical psychologist and visiting lecturer at Cornell. He moved to Ithaca in 2017 and has two children who attend ICSD. He currently serves as the chair of the curriculum committee, a member of the audit committee, and the board liaison for Ithaca High School.
Krantweiss’ primary motivation for running for the board last year was to ensure a robust academic program for his children in the district, combined with his concerns about hiring and retaining quality teachers. Because of his background in psychology, he wanted to ensure the district had a quality special education program. If re-elected, he hopes to continue his work improving the district's programs through his position on the curriculum committee.
Krantweiss said that he believes the budget is one of the main issues the board currently has to tackle. He was one of the board members who proposed a new budget with a lower tax levy at the April 16 meeting and said he believes cuts should only be made in places that aren’t student-facing.
“I think the biggest issue that we are facing right now is we have a budget that is growing every year, we have a lot of community members who [...] raised their concerns about how they are going to afford the year-over-year increases,” Krantweiss said. “I think it’s really important for board members to listen to community members. [...] Community members want the budget to support the students, the learning, and the teachers, but they’re also worried about the size of the budget.”
Todd Fox
Fox is the founder and CEO of Visum Development Group, an Ithaca-based real estate investment and development group that has created hundreds of housing units in newly constructed apartment buildings. Fox is a challenger in this year’s election, with the allocation of spending on capital improvements being the main item he hopes to improve in the district.
Fox was born and raised in Ithaca and has three children within the district. He has coached for multiple athletics teams in ICSD, and his “spark” to run for the board was his concerns over this year's proposed budget. He believes that his background in development and construction will assist the board with saving money in areas such as capital improvement projects.
“With the capital improvement projects, they're spending tens of millions of dollars a year,” Fox said. “They have a hundred million dollars in deferred maintenance, so I think there's definitely millions of dollars that could be saved. I think that’s where I create a lot of value, and hopefully that means more money for teachers, for programs, and hopefully tax savings as well.”
Fox believes he brings a unique perspective when compared to other board members by being able to manage and negotiate construction projects and contracts. He hopes to add diversity “in terms of skills and abilities'' to the board. He added that objectivity and the ability to see all sides of an issue are qualities that he believes are crucial for board members to have.
Moira Lang
Lang is the current vice president of the board and a retired educator within the district. She spent 35 years teaching, with 25 of those years at Ithaca High School. Lang was first elected in 2015, serves on the human resources and policy committees, and is the board liaison to Belle Sherman Elementary and Cayuga Heights Elementary. If re-elected, she would serve a fourth term.
Past her own teaching experience, Lang has multiple family members who are also teachers in the district, as well as grandchildren, great-nieces, and great-nephews who are students in the ICSD.
“Education has been the focus of my entire adult life, so being involved in education is significant to me,” Lang said. “I’m very invested in the fact that Ithaca has always been a school district that is innovative, and that the school district has a vision of educating all of our children as best as they can.”
Lang said her time on the board has been “a learning experience” and that there are always challenges. She feels there is more to be done on the board and that there is a very steep learning curve to being a school board member, especially with the changing academic landscape.
Lang said that she decided to run for reelection because she knows what it means to be a board member and because the district is at a crucial time for decision-making, specifically regarding the budget.
Lang believes the most significant issue the current board and district are facing is recruiting, maintaining, and supporting teachers at a time when teachers have an increasing list of expectations.
“Teaching has become more difficult than when I was a teacher,” Lang said. “The pandemic certainly exacerbated it, but I think the whole societal landscape is affecting children and adolescents deeply, and it’s affecting our staff.”
Barry Derfel
Derfel is another challenger in this election and is a retired educator of over 30 years. He has lived in Ithaca for 43 years and raised three children within ICSD. Derfel has worked as a teacher in several ICSD schools, as a principal at Newfield High School, and as an assistant superintendent for instruction at TST BOCES.
Derfel said his primary motivation to run was that he began attending curriculum and board meetings and noticed that teaching was becoming much more difficult after COVID.
“I’m a teacher to the core and education, I think, is incredibly important in a democracy,” Derfel said. “As I started watching the board meetings it became really clear to me that the whole system is feeling stressed. The whole system is struggling to meet all of the intersecting demands that are required to ensure that students graduate with all of the skills they need and to have productive lives.”
Derfel felt that his experience as an educator could help develop creative solutions to many of the district’s current problems, but as a viewer of a board meeting, he couldn’t help much.
“[Much of my work] is all about bringing different stakeholders together, who often believe that they have conflicting priorities or do have conflicting priorities, and helping them navigate through that and find common ground and develop solutions,” Derfel said. “That's why I want to get involved; I feel like I can bring all that to the community.”
Emily Workman
Workman, a challenger in this election, works in educational policy as the managing director of strategy and partnerships at the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center, as well as the president of Northeast PTA and vice president of the ICSD PTA Council.
Workman lived in Ithaca as a child and returned to Ithaca after living in Washington, D.C., to raise her two children in the district. She said she was attracted to ICSD’s focus on equity and academic excellence.
“I have been focused on early childhood and K-12 education for my whole career,” Workman said. “I bring a lens of what policies actually have the intended outcomes that they are meant to have for kids, and I also bring the lens of knowing that just because policies have had positive outcomes, doesn’t mean they will always have positive outcomes in every district.”
Workman believes that her experience in data-driven policy-making will help the district achieve its goals, which they are currently struggling to achieve.
“I think this district has goals that are set really high for students, but the way that the goals and policies are actually being implemented is not translating into positive impacts for kids, and it’s not translating into retaining high-quality teachers,” Workman said. “They either haven’t collected the data [that shows the results and impacts of policies], or they’re not readily sharing that information with the community and the board for them to make informed decisions about when the district needs to take a different direction.”
Workman hopes to see the district’s communication and engagement with the community improved by holding the administration accountable as a board member.
“The problems in this district are exacerbated by the fact that [the district] does not prioritize engaging the community, hearing from them, being responsive, and engaging in dialogue,” Workman said. “I think that my role is about accountability for the administration.”
Steve Cullen
Cullen, a challenger in this election, is the managing director at the Cornell CMS High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider Upgrade Project and the founder and CEO of ARORA Solutions LLC. He said he is running for a multitude of reasons, including safety incidents that his child experienced at a school within ICSD and the district's overall decline in academics and mental health.
Due to time conflicts, Cullen provided the Ithaca Times with a statement responding to the same questions that the other candidates were asked.
Cullen believes that the district's biggest issue is the budget. He thinks that the district needs a long-term partnership with Cornell to ensure that the university is adequately supporting the education of the Ithaca community.
“We need to identify the root cause of our academic decline with technical data analysis and support delivering services to all students who need it,” Cullen wrote in a statement to the Ithaca Times. “We need a balanced scorecard to target resources effectively to our schools and show data-driven improvement plans and monitoring.”
If elected, Cullen said that his main goals would be to implement trauma-informed educational programs and maintain classroom safety.
“After COVID, years of being neglected by our institutional systems, and our parents being underpaid and under-appreciated, we face trauma,” Cullen wrote. “The reason for our classrooms being unsafe has to do with emotional issues, which can be helped. I want to ensure that we address our social-emotional issues with equity-centered trauma-informed educational programs for teachers rolled out by the administration.”
Voter Information:
In addition to the Board of Education election vote, there will be three propositions on the ballot.
The first proposition will be for the $168 million budget. If voted down, the board can choose to propose an alternate budget and hold another vote. If the second vote fails, the board will have to adopt a contingency budget, under which they will only be allowed to levy as much money as they did in the 2023-24 budget. The 2023-24 budget contained a $107 million tax levy and did not require an override of the state-imposed tax cap. This proposition will require a 60% supermajority vote to pass.
The second proposition would allow the board to use funds from the District's 2022 capital reserve fund to purchase up to four electric buses, four diesel buses, and six passenger vans, with a maximum amount of $3,200,000.
The third proposition, if passed, will authorize the district to establish a $125 million capital improvement bond for a capital project to improve the district’s bus garage and add more chargers for electric buses. Construction for this capital project will begin in 2026. The district currently has a 7% debt service allocation integrated into its budget from the 2019 capital project, which the district says will not increase if this proposition is passed.
You must be 18 years old, a citizen of the U.S., registered to vote in Tompkins County and a resident of the district for a minimum of 30 days before May 21. To find your voting location and for more information on the election, budget vote, and capital project, visit https://www.ithacacityschools.org/page/budget-vote-election.
