MAPLEWOOD/SOUTH ORANGE, NJ — South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education President Wayne Eastman and first Vice President Madhu Pai will be running for re-election in November with newcomer Margaret “Peggy” Freedson, a professor of education at Montclair State University. Current board member Jeffrey Bennett will not be running for re-election.
As a strategic marketing specialist who serves as senior vice president and group director for Publicis, one of the largest global advertising holding companies, Pai, a Maplewood resident, has nearly 20 years of experience building brands and communications programs to support customer loyalty and revenue growth. She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from SUNY Plattsburgh. Pai has lived in both Maplewood and in South Orange with her husband, Nikhil, and their two children, a daughter who is a rising sixth-grader at South Orange Middle School and a son who will enter Jefferson the fall as a third-grader.
Pai’s passion for excellence in education began before she had children. In high school, she was a peer tutor and, in her 20s, she worked with at-risk children in the New York City public high schools via the Minds Matter program. Once she moved to Maplewood, Pai immersed herself in her children’s schools, leading the Parent Advisory Group at the South Mountain YMCA and becoming an active member of the Marshall-Jefferson PTA and Executive Board. She has been a member of the BOE since May 2012 and has served as the board’s first vice president since January.
“Over my three plus years on the board, I’ve enjoyed working with Wayne, Jeff Bennett and all our colleagues on behalf of all the children of our district, as well as on behalf of our tax-stressed residents,” Pai said in a press release. “Now, I’m excited about campaigning with Wayne and our new running mate, Peggy Freedson, who brings a depth of knowledge and a commitment to teaching and curriculum that make her a worthy replacement for Jeff. I look forward to the opportunity to lead going forward with Wayne, Peggy, newly hired Superintendent John Ramos, and everyone on the board and in the community over the next three years. I believe we have a great chance in Maplewood and South Orange to combine the values of access and accountability in practical ways that will make our district a nationally recognized beacon.”
Freedson is a professional educator who began her career as an elementary school teacher with the Los Angeles Public Schools, where she primarily served Spanish-speaking children from low-income families. Since 2003 she has been a full-time faculty member at Montclair State University, where she prepares preschool and elementary-teaching candidates in language arts literacy education. A 1987 graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, she holds an M.Ed. in international education and an Ed.D. in language and literacy from Harvard University. She lives in South Orange with her husband and their two children, a rising 10th-grader at Columbia High School and a rising third-grader at South Mountain Elementary.
From 1993 to 1995, Freedson worked in Mexico as principal investigator on a research project for the Mexican Ministry of Education on Mayan-speaking students, which resulted in a book. As a member of the Department of Early Childhood, Elementary and Literacy Education at Montclair State University, Freedson has worked with program administrators and in-service teachers throughout New Jersey, providing training on effective teaching for young English language learners and on language arts literacy. She has mentored student-teachers in elementary classrooms in Essex County, and she currently teaches in the Newark Urban Teacher Residency Program. She has served as a frequent class parent, in-class volunteer, and three-year co-chairwoman of the South Orange Middle School book fair.
“As a former elementary school teacher in Los Angeles, whose career has been devoted to preparing preschool and elementary school teachers, I believe strongly in the power of great teaching to inspire a lifelong love of learning and to transform children’s lives,” Freedson said in the release. “Like many parents throughout the community, I see the South Orange-Maplewood schools as storehouses of enormous teaching and student talent, but also as places of inconsistency and unfulfilled promise for many students. A successful Board of Education is a collaborative team that takes advantage of diverse skills. I have much to learn from Wayne, Madhu and all the other board veterans — at the same time, I am confident that my skills and my passion for learning and teaching will allow me to make a constructive contribution to the governance of the district right away.”
Before becoming a professor at Rutgers Business School-Newark and New Brunswick, Eastman, who teaches business ethics and business law, worked as a community organizer in St. Louis, a prosecutor of white-collar crime in Manhattan, a Wall Street litigator and a National Labor Relations Board attorney in Newark. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Eastman has two children, who graduated from Columbia High School in 2009 and 2011, and is married to Darcy Hall, a high school English teacher in Passaic County.
After moving to South Orange from Newark in 1992, Eastman became active in Friends and Neighbors and the Community Coalition on Race, and ran real estate tests as president of MUSE, a nonprofit corporation affiliated with the CCR. He was the founding president, and is now the secretary, of GlobalSOMA, a nonprofit corporation established in 2011 to promote and celebrate Maplewood and South Orange as global communities. He has served on the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education since 2006, and has been its president since January.
“In my first two terms on the board from 2006 to 2012, I worked with my colleagues and with the superintendent we hired to lift student academic achievement — when I first ran, two of our elementary schools had lower scores than the school in Newark my children would have gone to if we’d stayed there — and to support statewide reform to hold administrators and all educators accountable,” Eastman said in the press release. “Since 2012, and since 2015 as board president, I’ve worked with Madhu, Jeff and others to foster the next wave of progress for our schools, which I believe will combine themes of choice, faculty governance, business and career education, global awareness, and innovation to respond to serious fiscal constraints.
I’m happy to be on a slate with Madhu and Peggy, and I’m grateful to have an opportunity to continue to serve our children and our community.”