A position on the school board is an honor to serve the students of the district as well as serve the community. One of the virtues of a school board is being non-partisan, therefore, one can cross file. It is important to have strong moral values and not whether one belongs to one party or the other.

Only two of my signs say “Republican Families” support myself and Dr. Lillie Langlois. I am a life-long Republican as well as my husband and my children. We love Jersey Shore and love all of the schools in the Jersey Shore Area School District. Because we live in a rural area, most of our supporters are in fact Republican families. One of the signs is on land owned by two Republicans.

The majority of my constituents who are from both parties want to keep their rural, community schools open and I support my constituents wholeheartedly. I personally voted for Scenario C because it answered the call of three distinct groups in the Jersey Shore Area School District. Those who wanted more efficiency and savings, more fairness, and for schools to be kept open. After a one-time balancing, all incoming class sizes will be balanced, schools will remain open and run in an efficient manner, and the plan boasts the same reduction of faculty positions. For the taxpayer, this is a savings of up to $700,000 over a two-year period and did not require the displacement of 600 young children. Another advantage of the plan is we were able to avoid creating the largest primary school in Lycoming County (200 students larger than Williamsport) and will have a consistent average of 20 students per class whereas the closure plan would have had up to 26 students per class. The vote was 6-3 in favor of Scenario C (two-thirds of the school board) which vote was made up of both Republicans and Democrats.

Between carefully monitoring the district debt and working to retain and return our students from charter schools we can bring relief to the taxpayer while meeting the needs of our students. The district debt and charter school payments make up over 5 million dollars per year which is over 10% of the district budget. This is unacceptable. We are on the right path and we need to look forward, not back.

A board member is one of nine – we cannot do anything as an individual – we work as a board. As it should be, school board members are made up of people from our community from all walks of life.

I would appreciate the continued support from the voters in Region 1, Jersey Shore Area School District.

NANCY PETROSKY

Watson Township

Submitted by Virtual Newsroom