To the Editor:

We are writing this letter as a statement of our strong support for Debbie Bronfeld; she is running for a position on the Princeton Board of Education.

We have been friends with Debbie for over 16 years. We met when her youngest and our only child were babies, and we have had the pleasure of watching our children grow and flourish, in their own ways, in the Princeton public schools.

Running for the Board of Education makes sense given what we know about Debbie. She has always been civic minded. Her choices of employment, for example, reveal how she wants to help others. For example, she was the executive director of Dress for Success, a not-for-profit organization that helps women become economically independent by providing professional clothing and the tools needed to succeed. In more recent years she has worked for Mercer Street Friends Food Bank as a program associate, first as a volunteer, then as an employee. Her responsibilities there include helping people sign up for food stamps, and providing seniors with needed food supplies. In addition, she runs a program that provides backpacks of child-friendly, non-perishable food that goes home each weekend with children in 18 schools across Mercer County. She also helps her community outside of work, most recently spending each Sunday registering Princeton citizens to vote.

Debbie has long been a champion of Princeton schools, and she has great long-term reasons to be involved. Both her sons have been in the Princeton Public schools for their entire education, first Littlebrook, then JWMS, and now Princeton High School. Her older son, Harrison, recently graduated from Princeton High and her younger son, Max, is now a junior there.

Not content to just enjoy the benefits of the Princeton school system from the sidelines, Debbie has long been involved in being an active school parent. She was a member of the Parent Teacher Organization at Littlebrook. She volunteered as a room parent, as a worker in Littlebrook’s library and at JWMS’s book fair. She has frequently attended school board meetings as an interested parent. A frequent presence at school functions, Debbie has always been counted on to show her support at concerts, football games, and musicals. Want more evidence of her support? Look across the Princeton High School football field: cups on the fence spell out “Go Tigers!” “Go Blue!” in white and blue. Debbie had a hand in that too.

Debbie is running for a spot on the Board of Education because she wants to work to ensure that all children in Princeton get the quality education that they deserve. We are writing this letter today because we fully support her candidacy.

Wendy Heath, Stephen Kaplan

Benjamin Rush Lane