I served on the Hardyston Board of Education alongside Brian Drelick and Nick Demsak, and I want to tell voters what that work was like.
We governed through years when Trenton cut our aid on a schedule we didn’t set, and through a pandemic nobody had a playbook for. Those were not abstract budget exercises. Every year meant deciding what to protect. Through all of it, Hardyston kept its per-pupil cost below comparable districts without cutting the programs that make this a district families choose.
That doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen quickly. It happens in the parts of the job nobody thanks you for: committee meetings, budget line items, the long conversations before a vote. It happens when people are willing to disagree openly and then govern together once the decision is made. Brian and Nick did that work for years. I watched them do it.
Neither of them treated a board seat as a platform. I never once heard either raise a national issue at a Hardyston meeting. They asked what it cost, what it did for students, and whether we could sustain it.
If I’d put one question to every candidate on this ballot, it’s this: what have you already done for these schools, before there was an election to run in? Brian and Nick’s answer runs back years, and it’s all in the minutes.
One practical note. Five candidates are running for three seats, and you have three votes. You are not required to cast all three. If you want Brian Drelick and Nick Demsak on this board, the clearest way to say so is to vote for the two of them and leave the third blank.
David Van Ginneken
Hardyston
