BOE Candidate Profile: Alice Olker

Our profiling the in the continues with this discussion with Alice Olker, who is running on a challenger ticket with and Shannon Sarno.

• Candidate name: Alice Olker
• Address: 9 Chatham St.
• Occupation: Retired teacher and principal; member of Heritage Point Covenants Committee; volunteer for St. Mary's social ministry to homebound residents

A Barnegat resident for three years, Olker spent 45 years in education. She was an elementary school teacher, curriculum developer, union chapter leader and a principal in the private Catholic school system in Brooklyn and Queens. 

She’s making a bid for a seat on the Barnegat Board of Education, she said, because she hopes to use that experience to help guide smart spending and policy in the district.

Already an active volunteer in the Heritage Point community and in St. Mary’s Parish, “I thought I would branch out and give support in my area of expertise,” she said.

“I have to be honest,” Olker said, “I don’t like the fact that our taxes keep rising, and a great deal comes out of the school budget. So I’m really interested in getting the most that we can for the children with a little wiser spending.” 

As a private school principal in a poor New York neighborhood, Olker said she frequently had to make tough financial choices. 

“There were times when we had to make cuts to make sure the school remained open,” she said. “I’m pretty adept at knowing where you can make cuts…without compromising the education of the children.”

Sometimes, she said, that meant eliminating frills – and that goes hand-in-hand with some concerns Olker said she’s heard about the failure rate in the Barnegat school district.

“If you have that, then perhaps you have to get down to basics more,” she said. “I don’t think as a school board member, I should be running a classroom or telling teachers what to do.” But she could offer input on how best to spend limited resources to better kids’ performance, she said.

She said she did just that when she brought up the reading scores of her mostly immigrant students by forgoing the method of teaching kids to read from novels – popular at the time, but ineffective in her own school, where literacy was low to start with ­– and selecting a curriculum that focused on the fundamentals. 

“While you want the school to provide as much as it can for the child, you have to be realistic about the spending,” Olker said, and she hopes she can help the Barnegat School District achieve that balance.

“That’s why basically I’m running,” she said. “I think I could be of some assistance somehow.”