Donna Peirez, candidate for trustee, is currently serving on the board despite having a serious conflict of interest.
Ms. Peirez’s daughter, Rachel Venegas, is employed by the same school district where Peirez serves as a trustee. Ms. Venegas is a teacher at EM Baker Elementary School – (https://www.greatneck.k12.ny.us/domain/117). Peirez has influence over and votes on decisions that affect her daughter’s salary and benefits.
Even if Ms. Peirez only would recuse herself for voting on the salaries and benefits of the teachers, but she would not recuse herself for other expenditures, still, that would constitute a conflict.
In such cases, after voting against the non-salary or non-benefit spending, there would be more funds available for the salaries and benefits of the teachers. Either Ms. Peirez or Ms. Venegas should give up her involvement with the District for the sake of the integrity and trustworthiness of the GNPS school system.
Carolyn Gerstenfeld
Great Neck
First of all, How dare you publish the name and school of Donna’s daughter? She is not running for office. She deserves her privacy. Second of all, There is absolutely no conflict of interest here. Donna’s obligation is to the entire Great Neck school district. She has done an excellent job of separating herself from her relationship with her daughter as a trustee. Thirdly, Donna has been serving on the board for years and no one has ever thought that this is a problem until now. Why, suddenly, are you creating an issue that doesn’t exist? This is pure evidence of dirty politics. I challenge Emil to condemn this letter.
This is absolute nonsense. Rachel Venegas was my child’s kindergarten teacher in 2005 and was already a tenured, established teacher. She has been employed by GNPS for 23 years. She is truly one of the most remarkable educators I have known and that includes many I met during my 30+ year teaching career.
Donna Peirez was a teacher in our school district for many years and retired in 2016. She has been a board member for six years, during which only one contact was negotiated with the teachers Union. The only thing that changed in that contact, to my knowledge, was a very minimal salary increase that didn’t even cover the cost of living before this recent inflationary period. Oh, I believe another thing that changed was an increase in teachers’ contributions to their health insurance. One could hardly call that beneficial.
You will need to dig far deeper to find something that would cause eyebrows to raise on Donna’s re-election. Meanwhile, we know that Mr. Hakimi has zero experience negotiating contracts or overseeing spending of the magnitude that is part of the budget. We do know he has never even done as much as a bake sale but 100% represents the Mashadi (not Persian) community that reside with this district.
Try again. We’ll wait. And we’ll vote for Donna.
This article is a joke! Hakimi has 4 children in the school district! Is that not a conflict of interest too! Why dont you write an article on the real conflict of interest….The EMB PTO president is a parent, a district employee and a UNION MEMEBER!!! now if that is not a conflict, I dont know what is! How can someone who represents the interests of parents also represent the interests of the union and a loyal objective employee! She needs to resign
PTO president, employee, union member = major conflict