Kevin Gomez, an attorney and father of four children attending the Middletown School District, is seeking another three-year term on the local school board.
During the past six years, Gomez has used his board post to raise awareness on issues that he considers important, including school safety, full state funding, and state mandate reform.
As the chair of the school district’s Fair Funding Committee, he drafted a resolution calling for the state government to adopt an independent budget line for school safety, which board members later adopted.
Having annual state money earmarked for public safety can ensure reliable funding for local school districts in the long run, Gomez said.
“School safety should not be subjected to the ups and downs of a budget. It should not be a negotiating chip. It should always be a priority,” he told The Epoch Times.
It is the very issue that motivated him to run for the school board in 2017, he said.
At the time, the district had discontinued the practice of having school resource officers inside school buildings and on campuses, which concerned him as a parent.
A school resource officer is a sworn police officer responsible for the safety and crime prevention in schools.
One year later, on the heels of the high-profile mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, the Middletown school board approved a budget with $740,000 allocated for seven new school resource officers, according to a Times-Herald Record article.
Another issue that Gomez advocated for is full funding of foundation aid, a main source of state money for 730 or so school districts across New York.
Created in 2007 as a direct result of a lawsuit, the foundation aid formula requires the consideration of school district income levels in state funding distribution.
However, the state government failed to fully fund the program for almost a decade.
By 2019, school districts in Orange, Ulster, and Sullivan counties were owed at least $220 million in foundation aid from the state, according to Gomez.
He drafted and passed a board resolution calling on the state to make up for the shortage.
In 2021, a lawsuit by New Yorkers for Students’ Educational Rights forced the state to fully fund the program, resulting in a historic influx of money into low-income districts, such as Middletown.
While advocating for state funding, Gomez remains wary of state mandates, especially unfunded mandates that pass costs onto districts and taxpayers.
“The state should allow the local school districts to be able to come up with their own initiatives and ideas to address problems with freedom,” he said.
Through an op-ed in the Times-Herald Record, he called for allowing districts to apply for a waiver when a mandate is no longer needed, or a less expensive means can be found.
Board Diversity
Gomez said his opinions do not always agree with other members, which is precisely the beauty of having a diverse school board.
“Some of us are more conservative, and some are more liberal,” he said. “As a board member, I advocated for my positions, but if I lose, it is also my duty to stand behind the decisions of the board—that is the way the board operates.”
He said his job as a board member is to make the district more competitive in the education market.
“I personally support school choice—I don’t believe that just because you are in a public school system, you must be against private schools,” he said. “We just have to make our system competitive so that at the end, we all balance each other out.”
Running for another term, he hopes to continue to advocate for more academic opportunities for first-generation immigrant students, programs for special needs kids, and vocational courses for high schoolers.
He is the only Hispanic American on the nine-member school board in a district where 60 percent of the student body is Latino.
The district serves around 7,200 students in the City of Middletown, the Town of Wallkill, and a small portion of the Town of Wayayanda.
Background
A Brooklyn native, Gomez attended Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and Brooklyn Law School before working as a prosecutor at Kings County District Attorney’s Office.
After he got married, he moved to the Bronx, where he taught law classes for about six years at Bronx Leadership Academy, a public high school founded by the South Bronx Churches.
“The school was a result of a local community effort where people came together and said we are not happy with the status quo, and we want to empower our children to pursue the American dream,” he said.
In 2006, Gomez and his family moved to Middletown for a better life for his children, he said.
He worked as a social studies teacher in the Middletown School District for a year and then as a prosecutor at the county district attorney’s office for two years.
He also has a private law practice specializing in family law, criminal practice, and immigration.
