School Board Candidates

Years in District:
I lived in H-o-H from 1980 - 1996, 2001 - 2003, and 2013 - Present

Family Info:
I'm married and have an 8th Grader that goes to FMS

Educational Background:
I graduated from HHS in 1996, and SUNY Buffalo in 2000, with a degree in Communications

Professional Experience:
I have worked in media Production for the last 28 years, working on projects ranging from the Super Bowl to chicken-wing based interview shows.

Civic, Community Activity:
I'm a member of the Friends of the Youth Council and a member of Riverview Manor Hose Company #3, in the Hastings Fire Department.

Reason for Running for the Board of Education:
The heart of Hastings has always been its people. My connection to this village didn’t begin with this campaign, but rather started as a kid at Hillside, learning from the incredible teachers who shaped who I am.

I’m looking forward to strengthening my connection to this village and doing everything I can to support our citizens and institutions. I’m ready to focus on working with existing board members and the administration to make our schools and our community the best it can be.

Years in District:
Resident from 2016 to 2020 then from 2024 to present

Family Info:
Dr. Rochelle Nelson is married to Seab Jackson, and together they are proud parents raising two children within our community: Sebastien Jackson, a thriving second grader, and Logan Jackson, their joyful toddler.

Educational Background:
PhD in Physiology and Biophysics from Stony Brook University

Professional Experience:
Dr. Rochelle Nelson is a dedicated educator, innovative academic coach, and tenure-track biology professor with over a decade of experience fostering student-centered learning. Her expertise in integrating research-based coaching strategies has significantly improved student engagement and academic resilience. Dr. Nelson's proven record of mentoring students in national award-winning undergraduate research projects demonstrates her commitment to academic excellence and student empowerment. As a published scholar in academic coaching and STEM education, she is deeply invested in addressing challenges such as impostor syndrome and developing evidence-based, inclusive educational practices.

Reason for Running for the Board of Education:

I am running for the Board of Education to advocate for student-centered learning environments that support academic excellence and emotional resilience. With extensive experience as a biology professor, academic coach, and mentor, I am committed to fostering personalized, inclusive education that prioritizes student well-being alongside rigorous academics. My professional background uniquely equips me to contribute meaningful insights and strategies to enhance educational practices.

Recent budget initiatives reflect priorities that resonate with my educational values, including investments in personalized learning, smaller class sizes, and enhanced support programs at Farragut Middle School. I am eager to contribute to the continued development of Special Education services and infrastructure improvements to ensure inclusive, engaging, and flexible learning environments that holistically support student development.

My vision includes implementing district-wide academic coaching to build student resilience and address challenges like impostor syndrome and executive functioning deficits. I also aim to expand STEM and research opportunities to foster critical thinking and community engagement initiatives to enhance parental support. My campaign emphasizes personalized, inclusive education, robust extracurricular opportunities, and fiscally responsible, strategic growth to ensure optimal outcomes for all students.

Years in District:
My family has lived in Hastings for 11 ½ years.

Family Info:
My husband and I moved to Hastings in October of 2013. At the time our daughter was three years old and I was seven months pregnant with our son, who was born in December. Our daughter attended Rivertowns Preschool before starting kindergarten at Hillside in 2015. She is now in her first year at Hastings High School. Our son attended Little Leaf and Rivertowns Preschool before starting kindergarten at Hillside in 2019. He is now a fifth grader at Farragut. We live with our two rescue dogs, Finn who came to us from Tennessee and Kira who came to us from Sochi, Russia.

Educational Background:
I grew up on Staten Island and am a proud product of New York City public schools. I was fortunate to attend high quality elementary and intermediate schools that provided me with the education I needed to qualify to attend Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. From Stuyvesant, I attended Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, where I earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Dramatic Arts. I earned my Juris Doctor, summa cum laude, from Hamline University School of Law, also in St. Paul, where among other activities, I was a member of Law Review and the Moot Court team, and participated in the Juvenile Law clinic.

Professional Experience:
I am a partner at the law firm of Phillips Nizer LLP, which I joined in 2003, where I have built a practice primarily focused on matrimonial and elder/special needs law. In 2023 and 2024 I was named a New York Metro SuperLawyer for the practice of Elder Law. I joined Phillips Nizer from Skadden Arps LLP, where I focused primarily on securities class action litigation. While at Skadden, I had the opportunity to provide pro bono legal services representing parents who had struggled to obtain special education services for their son and were accused of educational neglect; a mother accused of violating the Hague Convention on International Parental Abduction, and Sanctuary for Families as amicus curiae in an appeal involving the court’s ability to consider domestic violence in resolving economic issues in divorce. I joined Skadden after serving as the principal law clerk to the Honorable Russel A. Anderson of the Minnesota Supreme Court after graduating from law school.

Civic, Community Activity:

Shortly after I moved to Hastings I began volunteering with Family-to-Family and became involved with the Hastings Food Pantry. In 2015, I began coordinating community-wide donations to keep the Pantry stocked and meet the needs of those in the community who depended on its services, primarily by creating, maintaining, and publicizing an Amazon wish list that let community members easily donate needed products and supplies. In March of 2020, as the Covid pandemic drove up need while shutting down supply chains and causing shortages, I took on the task of locating, ordering, and coordinating deliveries of food and supplies and expanded the Pantry’s offerings to include fresh produce. I performed this service until 2023 when the Hastings Youth Council took over the role of overseeing management of the Pantry.

In 2016, I became a founding member of the HOH Diversity and Inclusion Group, which subsequently became Hastings RISE. Between 2016 and 2018 I was involved in RISE’s advocacy with respect to the selection of a new Superintendent and coordinating community response to bias incidents, such as the posting of white supremacist fliers in Hastings.

Professionally, I have been a member of the Executive Committee of the New York State Bar Association’s Elder Law and Special Needs Section since 2019, where I am the Co-Chair of the Elder Abuse Committee and past Co-Chair of the Guardianship Committee. I currently sit on the New York Office of Court Administration’s Guardianship Advisory Committee.

Reason for Running for the Board of Education:

Our schools, like public schools across America, are facing a rapidly changing economic, political, legal, and pedagogical landscape. I have the skills, experience, and will to guide the District in facing those challenges and ensuring our students receive the high quality education they deserve, and which the residents of the District expect in return for their tax dollars. But to do this, we need a Board that is willing to face the uncomfortable truth that our schools have not lived up to their reputation of consistently providing a high quality education. We need a Board that listens to parents who have been forced to turn to expensive tutoring and supplemental programs to make up for what the schools are not providing. We need a Board that is willing to recognize our test scores and student successes are not proof that our schools are providing a high quality education, but often they are the result of extraordinary parental investment and effort. And we need a Board that is willing to hear parents whose children, despite all of the focus the District places on kindness and inclusion, experience bullying that our current policies and practices have proven insufficient to remedy.

As a practicing attorney for twenty five years, my job has been to investigate, research, delve into and analyze evidence, and scrutinize the qualifications of experts. I will bring those skills to bear as a member of the Board in service to our children and the community. I will not take at face value representations from the Administration, or anyone else, that a policy, practice, or curriculum is “evidence based” or supported by “experts”. If elected to the Board, I promise the students, parents, and community that I will not be a rubber stamp. While I will strive to partner with the Administration, I will not shy away from asking hard questions and demanding accountability.

My primary motivation for running for the Board is my concern over the District’s literacy curriculum. Under New York Law, the Board has the ultimate legal authority over, and responsibility for, the curricula taught in our schools. A District’s literacy curriculum is the backbone of all its other educational efforts. If children cannot read and write well, they cannot learn. In 2017, the Board accepted the Administration’s proposed literacy curriculum that fully embraced the largely discredited pedagogy of balanced literacy with little to no questioning or inquiry. For example, when the Board was told it should not be concerned about the proposed curriculum’s delay in teaching grammar until 5th grade because children learn grammar just from reading, “by osmosis”, the Board did not demand to see the research and evidence for such an extraordinary claim, but voted to approve the curriculum. Our children and families have paid the price ever since.

Numerous parents, myself included, who have had to deal with the District’s failure to adequately teach our children to read and write, have been advocating since at least 2022 for the District to replace the balanced literacy curriculum. For years, other states and school districts across the country have been turning away from balanced literacy and adopting phonics-based, structured literacy curricula. But our concerns have been downplayed, ignored, or we have been gaslit and told that our current literacy curriculum provides adequate phonics instruction. We have been told that the discredited practice of “3 cueing,” which teaches children to guess what a word is instead of teaching them how to decode words phonetically, is no longer used. But we know this is not true because we know what is happening in our children’s classrooms. Even if the Administration’s claim was true that our current curriculum has been revised to eliminate 3 cueing and provide adequate phonics instruction, the Administration has no plan to address the needs of older children who never received meaningful phonics instruction and were taught the flawed 3 cueing method.

Parents were told by the Administration that the District would not revisit the literacy curriculum unless forced to do so by New York State. Yet even after New York adopted a law in April 2024 aimed at restoring phonics-based literacy instruction, requiring all school district Superintendents to attest annually that their K-3 literacy curriculum is “evidence-based and scientifically based,” the Administration refused to change course. It was not until the Department of Education specified that detailed answers our literacy curriculum must be provided that the Administration retained a consultant with expertise in phonics-based literacy instruction to assist in an audit of the curriculum. This audit must be conducted with oversight from a Board committed to ensure that it is carried out objectively and with integrity and not with the goal of providing cover for the inadequacies of our literacy curriculum. The Board must be committed to holding the Administration accountable and demanding change where our curriculum is found to be inadequate and not in compliance with New York law.