3 vie for 2 seats on school board
Three first-time candidates are running for Board of Education seats in the May 16 election.
The two top vote-getters will serve three-year terms.
The candidates are Joe Baer, of 20 Shatzell Ave., Rhinecliff; Elizabeth Raum, of 9 Crosmour Road, Rhinebeck; and Jaclyn Savolainen, of 75 Delano Drive, Rhinebeck.
Incumbents Deirdre Burns and Lisa Rosenthal have chosen not to seek re-election.
Joe Baer
Baer, 62, is a retired video lighting director who has lived in the district for 38 years. He and his wife, Cynthia, an art teacher at Rhinebeck High School, and has two adult children.
“My biggest emphasis would certainly be to help in controlling the financial aspects of our schools,” Baer said of his priorities.
But also, he said, “there seems to be a voracious need to push the ... science, technology, engineering and math agenda, and it seems like we’re giving short shrift each year, more and more, to the arts. While all of that science, technology, engineering and math is very, very important to our children, I think the experience they get in the arts, be it performing arts or visual arts, is going to improve their daily life and their appreciation of everything that they do in the rest of their life.”
Baer said he also would like the district to offer practical skills courses.
“I see children [that] don’t know how to put a plug on a piece of wire that are never going to be able to take care of a house because they have no basic hand skills,” he said. “I think those are incredibly important for our children to be trained in [or] at least be introduced to.”
Baer graduated from Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx in 1972 and earned a bachelor’s degree in theater from SUNY New Paltz in 1976.
Baer was a fire commissioner in the Rhinecliff Fire District from 2012 to 2015 and currently is a volunteer with the district. He also is a vice president of Rhinebeck Grange and a volunteer with the Morton Library.
Elizabeth Raum
Raum, 51, works in independent film production and has lived in the district for four years. She and her husband, Clifton, have one child.
“Our number one priority is how to maintain the standard of programs that we’re offering while the number of children attending our
schools is declining,” she said.
“That wraps into the budget that we’re struggling with right now, and I see that struggle continuing in the year forward,” Raum added. “So working on a long-term plan on how we’re going to remedy this is what I hope to help our district figure out.”
Raum graduated from Northwood High School in Silver Spring, Md., in 1983 and earned a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies from Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
Jaclyn Savolainen
Savolainen, 43, is a librarian at Dutchess County Community College and has lived in the district full-time for nine years. She and her husband, Eric, have two children.
“I think the top priority needs to be developing a long-range strategy to manage the impact on declining enrollment and securing sustainable funding,” Savolainen
said.
“The board was discussing at recent meetings that was one of their goals this past year and they didn’t achieve it,” she said. “They had four other goals as well, and so they’re saying that perhaps next year, they could make that they’re only goal, and I agree with that.”
Savolainen said another challenge is balancing the need for outstanding programs, services and teachers against financial constraints.
“We want to preserve as much as we can, but we may have to make some hard choices,” she said. “Hopefully we can get a lot of input from the community about what’s important to them and input from a broad spectrum of the community.”
Savolainen graduated in 1991 from Capital High School in Santa Fe, N.M.; earned a bachelor’s degree in American studies from Yale University in 1995; and received a master’s degree in library and information science from SUNY Buffalo in 2013.
Savolainen is a member of the Rhinebeck Science Foundation.