Prencis Announces Candidacy for Pelham School Board

Pelham resident Paul Prencis announced that he is running for one of two open seats on the the Pelham school board in the May 15 election.

Prencis has lived in Pelham for 13 years with his wife, Catherine, and has three children, two of which attend Prospect Hill Elementary School.

He currently works as a math teacher Eastchester High School, where he teaches Regents geometry, honors precalculus and Advanced Placement calculus. Prior to this, he worked as the director of mathematics at Yonkers Public Schools. A list of his qualifications and his positions can be found on his Website here.

“I had been contemplating running for a couple of months and the biggest thing that weighed on me is that I have three young kids and I was afraid that it would take up all my time,” Prencis said. “In the end, I wanted to make sure my kids had people on the board who were making the right decisions for them.”

Prencis joins current board member and newcomers , , and in this year's election. Board President Robert Eicher, whose term ends this year, announced last month that .

Prencis said he would bring multiple  perspectives to the board. He’s lived in the community for a numbers as taxpayer without children and now he is experiencing life as a parent with children attending Pelham Schools.

“I’m a teacher, so I see things from that point of view and I was an administrator,” Prencis said. “I have a background in mathematics and as a problem solver,  I’m able to look deeply into things to find creative solutions.”

Prencis has taken the following positions for his campaign:

• Teachers in classrooms are the single most important investment we can make
• Small class sizes are important for the most needy of our students
• Mathematics Education is just as important as reading in our world today
• Demand the most of our teachers and reward them appropriately

Prencis said the district’s K-5 math curriculum Investigations in Number, Data and Space, which has been a source of , does a nice job of teaching concepts. But he said the curriculum falls short in providing students with drilled math instruction.

He doesn’t believe the district should overhaul the curriculum and switch to a program like Singapore Math, which comes with its own set of weaknesses.

“What Investigations does is it shows students that there is more to math than just learning a set of rules and when students understand that, they really can do anything in mathematics,” Prencis said.  

He believes Investigations can still be used in the district, but it needs to be supplemented with work from more traditional textbooks to ensure students get a balance of the conceptual and practical applications of math.

“It’s going to cost several hundreds of thousands of dollars to change to a new program, not to mention that everything in education takes a good three to four years before you see results,” Prencis said. “Those students in the first three or four years will be sacrificed and their going to make it to high school, where it’s only going to get worse.”

Increases in class sizes, especially in the elementary schools is also a concern for Prencis.

“One thing I know about early education, especially in grade K-3, is that once you start packing into the classroom, you start to lose them,” Prencis said. “We’re going to have to catch these kids up one way or the other. It’s being a penny wise and a pound foolish.”

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