Two Incumbents, Pair of Challengers Face Off in Mahopac Board of Ed Race
By Andrew Vitelli
In the Mahopac Central School District, four candidates, including two incumbents, are running for three seats in next week’s Board of Education election.
The candidates include the current board President Ben DiLullo, former board president Michael Mongon, career educator Marsha Waldman, who has expertise in educational technology, and the youngest person ever elected to the board, Tanner McCracken.
The election comes a year after the board appointed Christine A. Tona as superintendent of schools and the district grapples with an ultimatum from the state to change its mascot from the Mahopac Indians – and associated logos and imagery – or risk losing up to $38 million in state aid.
On the same day as the May 16 Board of Elections vote, students will vote from three options to replace the logo. The board is expected to make a final determination in June.
Ben DiLullo
A 27-year Mahopac resident, Ben DiLullo was elected to the board in 2020 and became its president in July 2022.
DiLullo previously served as president of the Mahopac Special Education PTO (SEPTO) from 2018 to 2020.
DiLullo points to Tona’s appointment as the most important action since he joined the board.
“She’s absolutely superb,” DiLullo told The Putnam Examiner. “If I don’t do one other thing, I’ve done my job in terms of getting her here, because she’s amazing.”
Still, DiLullo sees the district as being at something of a turning point, as the board embarks on the creation of a new five-year strategic plan.
“We are going to have a new vision,” he added.
A contract development and project manager who has worked for Pfizer for 33 years and has an MBA from NYU’s Stern School of Business, DiLullo said he is well-suited for this kind of project.
Many residents are frustrated by the state’s mandate that the district abandon its Indians nickname and logo, he said. But DiLullo said the district’s hands are tied with the state threatening to withhold what amounts to more than a quarter of the district’s annual budget in state aid.
“To me, the reality of it is, you don’t have a choice here,” he said. “The way I look at it is I am not forgetting the past; we are just moving on.”
His focus now is finding a new mascot that reflects the sense of community that is important to the district.
“Community has come up over and over again” in the district’s discussions on finding a new mascot, he said. “We want whatever mascot we pick to reflect those characteristics.”
DiLullo, whose wife is a third-grade teacher at Fulmar Road Elementary School, is a father of three. His oldest is a 2016 Mahopac High School graduate, while his youngest is a sixth-grader at Mahopac Middle School (HIs middle child graduated from Kennedy Catholic in Somers.)
DiLullo said one major focus is that the district remains a welcome place for students with a wide range of backgrounds and career goals.
“We have kids that are going to very prestigious schools and are very academically oriented, and then we have kids that will go into trades,” he said. “We are a district that has, you can argue, a little bit of everything.”
Tanner McCracken
When McCracken was first elected to the school board three years ago, he was too young to legally crack a beer to celebrate. Now 23 as he seeks re-election, he is still the youngest member of the board by a generation.
“I just wanted to bring the perspective to the school board and to the superintendent and her administration of what it was like to be a Mahopac student in the 21st century,” said McCracken, who moved to Mahopac in second grade and graduated in 2017. “When I ran, I said, “I don’t have any kids. However, I went to school with your kids.’”
A staffer for state Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt (R-North Tonawanda), McCracken said his love of history and politics inspired him to run for the board. One focus has been adding classes promoting personal life skills such as financial literacy for students so they leave high school with a basic understanding of how to manage their personal finances.
“We are full steam ahead on making (personal financial literacy classes) a graduation requirement,” McCracken said. “The superintendent is pretty much in full support, and that is because for three years, I have been pounding that drum.”
McCracken said he is frustrated by the state’s heavy hand in forcing Mahopac to change the school’s mascot, even making the district remove the image of an M with a spear through it.
“My main problem with it is that it is an unelected bureaucratic arm of the state government overriding what should be a local community decision,” McCracken said. “Unfortunately, I don’t think the school board in the past did a good job fostering a conversation about our mascot.”
McCracken acknowledged that Mahopac cannot afford to keep the logo given that the state has threatened to withhold some $37 million in aid if the district doesn’t find a new mascot. He says his focus now is making sure the next mascot reflects the Mahopac community while pushing for state funding to dull the financial impact of the logo change, which is estimated at up to $500,000.
“Just because the state is taking the mascot away, it does not mean we can’t respect the indigenous people that inhabited this land before us,” McCracken said. “We can do it through curriculum. We can do it through lectures.”
McCracken said his initial run, when he became the youngest candidate ever elected to the board, was also spurred in part by what he saw as a lack of transparency. He believes the district has made progress in encouraging open discussions.
One of the district’s biggest challenges moving forward will be overcoming the impact that the pandemic had on students, McCracken said. He wants to ensure that the district is measuring learning loss at the local level and taking steps to address students’ mental health, such as adding social workers.
“I heard from hundreds of parents about how remote learning and hybrid learning was not working,” said McCracken. “I’ve been stressing about this for three years, because I knew this was going to be a huge impact.”
Michael Mongon
A former board president, Mongon is hoping to return
“I remember what Mahopac used to be,” Mongon said. “It was a family. And what I have seen over the last decade, 10 or 20 years, is that it has kind of moved more towards a business. I am trying to get things back to where people were accountable, where students enjoyed coming to school, where teachers enjoyed coming to school.”
Mongon previously served two terms, from 2016 to 2022, and served two years each as board president and vice president. He did not run for re-election last year because he wanted to focus on helping his ailing father, who passed away in July.
A 1979 Mahopac High School graduate, Mongon said he initially ran because he felt that spending had gotten out of control.
“The budgets were like a runaway freight train, so to speak,” he said. “We wanted to get a voice in there and start to get some accountability.”
Mongon, a parks manager at Overpeck Park in Leonia, N.J., said he still sees a need for greater transparency.
He expressed particular concern about the way that technology has disconnected kids from their peers. He supported bringing Chromebooks into the classroom when he was first elected, but he now worries that the use of technology has gone too far.
“We have kids looking down too much and not looking up,” he said. “We have to find a happy medium.”
The use of electronic cigarettes in school bathrooms is among the biggest complaints from students and staff, Mongon said. He proposes adding vaping detectors in the bathrooms.
While Mongon acknowledges the district cannot afford to keep the Indians mascot, he does not think the board should rush into choosing a new mascot.
“If you really want to send a message to the state Education Department, don’t replace the mascot,” he said. “Just don’t use the Indian anymore. Because truth be told, for the last 20 years, it’s really been ‘Go ‘Pac.’”
He also emphasized the need to preserve records, artifacts and imagery of the logo.
“I just don’t want that stuff to end up in a storage bin that somebody forgets about,” he said.
Mongon and his wife, Lynne, have six children including three Mahopac High School graduates. Mongon met Lynne, a 1981 MHS graduate, in high school, he said.
Marsha Waldman
A 20-year Mahopac resident, Waldman touts her breadth of experience in the field of education.
She has taught English and computer technology at several districts in Westchester County and throughout the region but has also worked in educational technology, developing educational software and related materials for companies including Scholastic, Sunburst and the Center for Children and Technology, according to her bio. She has also worked as a tutor.
“Our kids are still recovering from the impact of having their education disrupted by COVID,” Waldman said. “Norms from the past have disappeared, and some of the new norms are not productive for teaching and learning.”
Waldman believes her experiences will help the district navigate the continued repercussions of COVID learning. She expects technological advances in fields such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality to play an ever-growing role in education, and sees her experience as invaluable.
“They are knocking at our doors, and we need to be ready to address these new technologies and incorporate them in productive ways,” said Waldman, who has a master’s in instructional technology and media from Teachers College at Columbia University. “There are going to be big changes in technology that are going to be a challenge for our schools.”
On the Indians nickname, Waldman pointed to the upcoming May 16 student vote.
“It enables them to take pride in it and feel involved,” she said. “We can go forward with a new name and a new mascot that we can all proudly back and celebrate.”
The school has little choice but to change the name given the ultimatum coming from Albany, she said.
“Some people are very unhappy about it, but the decision has been made,” she said. “I don’t think that we can forgo $38 million.”
Waldman’s daughter graduated from Mahopac High School in 2013 and is now a senior at SUNY Purchase. An atypical learner, Waldman said, her daughter came to the district in second grade.
“I consider her a success story,” Waldman said. “I’ve seen other kids like that go through and need specialized help to deal with their particular learning differences, and then I have seen them grow up to be successful young adults. I do think that a strong special ed department is important for our district. We are public education. We have to serve all our kids.”
Her experience with her daughter taught her to be an advocate for children with specialized needs, she said.
