Responses of Abdul Malik

Dear Friends,

Thank you for your letter, I appreciate the concern "powerhouse Arts District Neighborhood Association" has shown in reference to the oncoming Jersey City school Board elections.

Your letter not only reflects your concern and participation in education of our children, but also issues that we have as residents of our great City "Jersey City", Crimes, Violence, Drugs, High taxes, quality of life issues, increasing gap between poor/underprivileged and well to do, vast difference in quality of life between waterfront/City Center and poor neighborhoods and poorly performing City Agencies/Departments.

I would gladly join in a meeting with your members/friends and office barriers to explain what vision I have for improving quality of education for our children and to answer any question they may have.

In reference to your three questions, my response is as follows,

1. What has motivated you to run for Jersey City school board?
  1. I am a physician from Pakistan, and am deeply involved in the education of my children, from the very first day. I have long term relation with teachers and staff of school 16 where my children were student. Not only this I run a non profit Community organization, with emphasis to help my community in getting jobs with school Board and local Government and in many other areas.

  2. Over the period of time I have personally seen and experienced lot of problems in public school system,
    1. Lack of proper oversight and control of spending.
    2. Lack of fair and uniform policy in hiring minority applicants.
    3. Lack of academic and enrichment programs for the students.
    4. Lack of merit pay for the teachers.
    5. Lack of tougher disciplinary actions against students committing violence in schools.
    6. Lack of tougher Disciplinary action against teachers who engage in immoral and criminal actions/behavior.
    7. Lack of merit, and practice of favoritism in promotions, that discourages qualified and deserving employees.

  3. All of above reasons motivated me to run for school board. Since I believe in current situation one person alone is not able to achieve a lot, so I decided to organize a slate of three candidates to run, to get what I plan to achieve.
2. What are your top goals for your three year term?

My goals during my three year term will be as follows,
  1. To implement strict control over spending.
  2. To curb abuse and wastage of funds.
  3. To negotiate fair contract with teachers union and the top officials.
  4. To implement tougher Disciplinary actions against those involved in abuse of any kind and improper behavior and actions.
  5. To implement tougher Disciplinary actions against students who commit violence in schools.
  6. To lobby for more academic and enrichment programs for the students.
  7. To stop favoritism in hiring and promotions.
3. Are you running on a slate with other candidates? If so, who are they and what do you think you can achieve as a complete slate?

I put together a slate of three candidates, who are as follows,

  1. Abdul J. Malik (my self)
  2. Azam A. Riaz
  3. Khaled Dardir

Purpose of the slate is to achieve maximum, of what we want to, as one person alone can't achieve much in a crowd of nine.

I hope my response is good enough to satisfy all of your office barriers and members. Even then I will be glad to join with you all in a meeting to further know each other.

Please note that I am also putting up a slate for the City Council elections, and the reasons for this are almost the same.

I believe that our political system has been taken up by morally and mentally corrupt people, who have been abusing our support and making themselves rich at the cost of tax pares money and totally ignoring their duties and obligations towards their constituents.

I believe its time to bring Accountability, Honesty, Integrity and Decency in our political system and only way to achieve this is to get rid of all self serving and power hungry professional politicians and replace them with Honest, clean and Decent individuals, who have passion and potential to work for people of Jersey City not for special interests. With your help we can achieve this.

Thank you and May God bless you.

Yours very truly,

Abdul J. Malik
Team leader