School Board Candidate: David Wren

Eight candidates are vying for seats on the Board of Education in the April 27 election. Today, Wall Patch continues its election coverage with the latest in a series of candidate profiles.

All candidates have been invited to participate in a short interview and provide a brief biography and a photograph.  Additionally, Wall Patch has provided a short slide show of the candidates’ closing statements from the April 5 candidates’ night, which can be accessed by clicking on the icon to the right.

Candidate: David Wren

Address: 3243 Rambling Hill Ct.

Occupation: Owner, Safe Harbor Financial, Certified Financial Planner

Age: 46

Children: Two in district

Experience: Seeking third term

David Wren, a financial planner seeking his third term on the school board, cited passing this and future years’ budgets as the main challenge facing the district in the near term.

Wren also said the search for a new superintendent and union negotiations are top priorities for the board in the coming years.

Wall Township voters have defeated nine of the last 10 budgets, which has meant cuts in the district have had to be made nearly every year in the past decade, Wren said.

“We’ve gone beyond the skin and the muscle,’’ Wren said. “We’re down to the bone.’’

Wren said that in each year that a budget is defeated the school board has made cuts here and cuts there, mainly where parents and the majority of the community have not been able to feel the brunt of the impact, he said.

“But we're to the point where we can’t make those cuts anymore,’’ he said. “Any cut is going to be substantial. You can’t just put Band-aids on things anymore. You have to put everything on the table, which is exactly what we had to do this year.’’

Wren said the failure of so many consecutive budgets has put the district in the position where it was forced to consider the closure of West Belmar School – an idea that has at least temporarily been shelved – and outsourcing the custodial staff, a move that has been at least partially thwarted by concessions from the teachers’ union.

“It’s madness if you think about it,” Wren said. “Everybody wants the same things, but no one wants to pass the budget to get it.’’

Wren said the next school board will work with an ever-tighter pool of money and will have to come up with creative ways to raise revenue and get budgets passed.

“It (the schools budget) is something we, as a community, have total control over,’’ he said. “But we lose that control if we don’t pass the budgets.’’

Wren also said a major challenge the board faces is negotiating with the district’s unions. Wren said the board was in “fact finding mode’’ on that point and declined to discuss specifics.

The contract of schools Superintendent James Habel expires next year. Although Habel has not said publicly that he will not seek an extension, the school board at its Jan. 11 meeting cited the search for the district’s next superintendent as one of its top priorities, according to meeting minutes.

Wren said he would like to see the community involved in choosing the next superintendent.

“It needs to be a very transparent, all-encompassing search,’’ Wren said. “There has to be input from a lot of different people to hire the right superintendent. To me, that’s a common sense approach.’’

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Other School Board Candidate Profiles: