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The following “Meet the Candidates” series continues to spotlight individual residents who seek a seat on the Asbury Park Board of Education.

There are three three-year terms and two one-year terms up for contest on the Nov. 5 ballot, making a majority of the seats on the nine member board available. A total of nine candidates are in the running for the five spots. Full-term candidates are Connie Sue Breech, Arva M. Council, incumbent Nicolle D. Harris, Corey Lowell [shown above], and incumbent Qzeena Taylor. One-year unexpired term candidates are write-in hopefuls Calvin Anderson and Carol Jones, and incumbents Kenneth Saunders, Jr. and Felicia Simmons.

Today’s report features Corey Lowell. Lowell is running on the “Team Vitamin C” ticket with Calvin Anderson, Connie Sure Breech and Carol Jones.

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Corey Lowell, 38, is one of five candidates seeking a three-year term on the Asbury Park Board of Education [BOE]. She previously served as Asbury Park’s business administrator for three years.

Lowell has called Asbury Park home for the past two and a half years. She has 11 year’s experience working in the field of education. For the past two years, she has been employed as the business administrator for the Keansburg school district. Prior to her employment in Keansburg and Asbury Park, she served the Freehold school district for six years in the same capacity.

She received her bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University before moving on to obtain a master’s degree from Monmouth University in business administration.

For the past few years, Lowell has assisted fellow running mate Connie Breech with her annual Christmas toy drive, she said. The drive directly benefits kids in the Asbury Park area. She is also an avid runner and triathlete, and is a member of the “Jersey Girls Stay Strong Multi-sport Club,” an official USA Triathlon registered all-female multi-sport club, according to their website.

She has competed in four triathlons, two on her own and two as part of a relay team, she said.

Upon graduating from Monmouth, she got a job working as an auditor for an accounting firm. In her work as an auditor, the firm was charged with performing audits of several school districts. That was when she was introduced to the job of school business administrator and decided it was a career position she would like to pursue.

Lowell “admires people who are civic-minded,” and believes she can bring some “much needed experience” to the Asbury Park school board given her professional background, she said.

“I think that a board of education is an undervalued component that can build a quality community,” she said.

In her tenure as the district business administrator and school board secretary in Keansburg, Lowell has been “fortunate to be able to work alongside a well-functioning school board who agrees to disagree, but always makes decisions that are good for children and the community,” she said.

The Keansburg School District’s demographic is similar to Asbury Park, and the district itself has made great strides for their students in the past few years, Lowell said. The district recently announced their approval as a “choice district” in the Interdistrict Public School Choice Program beginning next year.

‘It a public school district marketing themselves as almost a private program, but open to the public,
she said.

She seeks a seat on the Asbury board because of an interest in participating in a community, and has “never felt more of a part of a community than in Asbury Park,” she said.

Lowell believes there is no single formula for student achievement, because if there were, “the state would come in an fix it with their magic formula,” but she does acknowledge a focus on early literacy as an important component.

Within the Asbury Park schools, Lowell would like to see an enhanced focus on college and career readiness, so that students get a greater exposure of what sorts of opportunities are out there for them.

“We need to be talking about college in the early grades—as early as second grade,” she said.

In the upper grades, students need “21^st century learning skills  for career readiness,” she said. Computers are now largely utilized in fields that were formally considered “manual” trades, like auto-mechanics and even carpentry.

A greater utilization of opportunities that can be achieved in the field of auto mechanics needs to be realized, including training for work on up-to-date vehicles like Smart cars.

Improving the school district’s culture and climate also tops Lowell’s list of school board to-do’s, should she win a seat, starting with improving staff morale, she said.

“It starts at the top with the chief school administrator,” she said. “It is important that he or she connect with the staff, and they get to know each other.”

“Being part of a team means that you share the rewards as well as the risks,” she said. It is part of the reason she chose to run on the “Team Vitamin C” ticket.

“We bring the power of knowing multiple people in the neighborhood, and the ability to bring those neighborhoods together because we have diverse backgrounds.”

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