The 2025 Power Players in Education list looks to honor the dedicated leaders across New York’s vast education system. From presidents of educational institutions to directors of nonprofits to policymakers, the 2025 Power Players in Education are at the forefront of shaping New York’s education landscape and guiding students towards a bright future. PoliticsNY’s Power Players in Education recognizes these public officials, policymakers, superintendents and scholars, advocates and activists, and labor, business and nonprofit leaders who work day in and day out to ensure New York’s students get the very best education.

The honorees are picked by the editorial staff of amNY/PoliticsNY

The NSP digitally registers, maps and analyzes the monuments erected during Sicily’s Norman period (ca. 1061-1194), arguably the most auspicious years in its long history. In so doing, the project provides new interpretations of the complex society that produced them, understandings made possible by a collaboration between history and STEM and made broadly accessible by digital technologies. With this grant, the team, which includes Dr. Casey Allen, Lecturer in Environmental/Earth Science at The University of The West Indies, Barbados, and Cultural Stone Stability Index Specialist for the Stone Heritage Research Alliance, Dr. Craig MacDonald, Associate Professor and Director of Pratt Institute’s Center for Digital Experiences, Mr. Joseph Hayes, Senior Software Engineer in the private sector, and Dr. Deepak Bal, Associate Professor in MSU’s Department of Mathematics, will be able to produce a fully functioning web app optimized for user experience and the public engagement of multiple audiences that clearly guides visitors while offering additional classes of monuments beyond the monasteries it currently contains (including stability triage for a subset of each), an integrated kinship network of associated people, and interpretation of the site’s data. Flexible and adaptable, the NSP presents a new model for digital conservation of cultural heritage.

“It’s definitely a great place to start, but hopefully it’s not where we stop,” says Farrah Fornarotto, a junior majoring in Anthropology, with minors in Archaeology and the new Native American and Indigenous Studies. “There’s a lot to tackle.”

The challenges date back decades. Munsee Three Sisters Farm provides traditional food for the Turtle Clan of the Ramapough Lunaape (Lenape) Nation, a tribe that can no longer safely farm its own land in Upper Ringwood, New Jersey. Environmental and health issues caused by industrial dumping have led to a generational decline in the Turtle Clan members’ ability to practice their culture, including the Munsee language, which is at risk of becoming as dormant as the winter fields.

An intensive, field-based partnership with the Turtle Clan Ramapough includes work at the Munsee Three Sisters Farm, where Montclair students and professors are helping the tribe’s Indigenous food sovereignty and language revitalization efforts.

A key aspect of Montclair’s contributions are organizing the tribe’s records and documents related to the industrial dumping on ancestral land. Students are at work to help gather the scientific evidence documented at the Superfund site, the health impact and oral histories from eyewitnesses, and with University resources, creating a single, digitally accessible repository for future researchers and the tribal members who continue to fight for proper cleanup of the land.

More than 300 pages of newspaper articles detailing the dumping of toxic paint sludge from a Ford Motor Co. factory have been indexed by students. “My students are going through and creating a table of contents identifying the names [of key players], the toxic chemicals listed in reports, physical sites that are listed, agencies that are listed, and creating a searchable tool for that whole collection of news articles,” says Mark Clatterbuck, associate professor of Religion and co-director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies program.

Montclair students taking part in the class projects say they share a commitment for helping Indigenous communities. Jala Best, a senior Psychology major, says her drive comes from her experiences as an Afro-Indigenous woman.

“Oftentimes the issues of Native communities are ignored or Native people are spoken about in the past tense, like we are not still living, breathing, surviving and fighting for justice …. You can’t even conceptualize that there are atrocities happening today because you believe that it’s a thing of the past,” Best says.

Mark Clatterbuck, right, oversees the garden signage with students Camille Howard, Julia Rodano and Farrah Fornarotto. “It’s the small things that build up, and eventually over time, the Turtle Clan’s language will be more visible to them and also to the public,” Fornarotto says.

Montclair has initiated a field-based partnership with Turtle Clan Chief Vincent Mann of the Ramapough Lunaape Nation. The University support includes students working directly with the tribe on food sovereignty, the language revitalization effort and ongoing environmental concerns as part of Montclair’s new minor in Native American and Indigenous Studies.

“The issues and the challenges of the Turtle Clan, they’re huge, they’re varied and there’s no shortage of them,” says Clatterbuck.

The program is closely tied to the University’s Land Acknowledgement Statement. Clatterbuck, along with History Professor Elspeth Martini and Anthropology Professor Chris Matthews consulted with New Jersey’s three state-recognized tribal nations – the Ramapough Lenape, Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape and Powhatan Renape – in drafting the statement, and also considered how it could represent a commitment from Montclair to working with and for their communities.

“It’s not just about making some sort of historical reference. It’s really about saying, ‘What is our responsibility to those communities?’” Clatterbuck says.

Mark Clatterbuck, associate professor of Religion and co-director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies program, constructs signage as part of the field work helping promote the preservation of Native American land and culture.

The program is intentionally community-engaged, hands-on and focused on problem-solving, including finding creative ways to support community-driven language revitalization and environmental recovery. “The Ramapough understand that part of their healing and survival is really dependent on recovering key aspects of their cultural ways,” Clatterbuck says. “Language is on par with restoring foodways and their access to clean water, land and air.”

Munsee language expert, Nikole Pecore, a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Nation in Wisconsin, has guided Montclair students studying Linguistic Anthropology in building a digital repository of instructional materials that will be used to train new Munsee teachers and support community learners.

“We’re looking at language as a key to culture, to bringing back Munsee speaking cultures, as well as other Lenape languages belonging to original peoples in the state of New Jersey,” says Associate Anthropology Professor Maisa Taha.

Work on the farm also includes students preparing the fields and helping deliver the organic, healthy, medicinal healing crops to the community. “It’s doing the nitty-gritty work with local communities and following their lead,” Clatterbuck says.

Meryem Teke, a senior Religion major, paints a garden sign at the Munsee Three Sisters Farm. The work is among the creative ways Montclair is supporting the Turtle Clan’s language revitalization and environmental recovery.

“It might be challenging to figure out how all of these different pieces fit together. But the fact of the matter is they are all intimately connected,” Taha says. “You can’t have language without culture. You can’t have culture without tribal sovereignty. You can’t have tribal sovereignty without environmental justice. What we’re bringing to our students and frankly, to ourselves as well, is this huge opportunity to work with our tribal partners in trying to understand those connections and come up with reasonable, impactful solutions that will serve them for years to come.”

Clatterbuck adds, “We’re all passionate about this on a personal level, and we see this as a matter of justice and addressing – you hear the buzzword ‘decolonization’ thrown around a lot – but as far as I’m concerned, this is what that work looks like. It’s messy, and it’s trial and error, and we’re figuring all this out as we go. But that is the work.”

Photo Gallery

Montclair’s new minor in Native American and Indigenous Studies is focusing on issues of indigenous sovereignty, cultural revitalization, environmental justice and language reclamation. Some of the field work is happening at the Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm in Newtown, New Jersey.

Montclair students have created signage for the Three Sisters Farm in the Munsee language. The illustrations will help tribal members as well as visitors to the farm visually connect the pictures and actual plants with the Munsee word. Efforts are also underway to create audio files so that learners can hear those words when accessed by QR codes added to the signs.

A rooster at Munsee Three Sisters Farm.

Story by Staff Writer Marilyn Joyce Lehren. Photos by John J. LaRosa.

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10 copies of All for Liberty will be given away in a free raffle to MSU students who attend this event on Zoom.

All for Liberty tells the powerful story of Nicholas Kelly, the enslaved craftsman who led the Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion, the largest slave revolt in the history of the antebellum American South. With two accomplices, some sledgehammers, and pickaxes, Nicholas risked his life and helped 36 fellow enslaved people escape the workhouse where they had been sent by their enslavers to be tortured. All for Liberty centers his rebellion as a decisive moment leading up to the secession of South Carolina from the United States in 1861. This compelling micro-history navigates between Nicholas’s story and the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, while also considering the parallels between race and incarceration in the nineteenth century and in modern America. Never before has the story of Nicholas Kelly been so eloquently told.

Dr. Jeff Strickland is Professor of History and History Department Chair at MSU. He teaches undergraduate courses on the Civil War Era. His first book was Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War–Era Charleston (University Press of Florida, 2015.

Dr. Kate E. Temoney is a former Assistant Dean of Students and currently an Assistant Professor of Religion at MSU. She is the co-chair of the Religion, Holocaust, and Genocide Unit of the American Academy of Religion and a co-founder of the Genocide Education and Prevention Project: /religion/events/genocide-education-and-prevention-project-geapp/. She earned a BA from Wake Forest University, an MEd from The College of William & Mary, and an MA and PhD from Florida State University. Trained as a comparative religious ethicist, she teaches courses on Religious Ethics, the Holocaust, African Religions, Jewish Applied Ethics, Religions of the World, and Religion & Human Rights.

This event is sponsored by the MSU Honors Program; all are invited to attend.

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A beverage initially mistrusted by the French (for its bitterness, health risks, and associations with the Ottoman Empire) attracted a burgeoning culture of consumers interested in exotic novelties, gave its name to the new space of the café, and by 1789 had become a beloved domestic beverage in France. Not content with transforming their own attitude toward coffee, through their colonies and mercantile actions the French also enabled the spread of coffee-drinking across the Atlantic and around the world in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

When: March 29th, 1:00 PM
Where: Dey Mansion in Wayne
Admission: Free
Presented By: Passaic County Board of Chosen Freeholders
Download event flyer: How the French Learned to Love Coffee

Reservations are required. Seating is limited.
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Hayes has recently received a nearly $50,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (HCRR) grant for her project, “Documenting the Past, Triaging the Present and Assessing the Future: A Prototype for Sicily’s Norman Heritage, ca. 1061-1194.” The award supports Hayes’ – an ongoing digital archival compilation of Sicilian monuments begun by Hayes and her husband, Joe, who is a software engineer in the private sector.

While he will serve as the new project’s chief technical architect, the University’s acting Earth and Environmental Studies Chair Greg Pope is the project’s co-director.

The one-year grant supports a pilot phase that will produce an online prototype that documents the 147 monasteries known to have been built between 1061 and 1194.  The team will provide historical and site-specific data for all of the monasteries, as well as photographic and video documentation and relevant genealogical data for the 52 surviving structures.

For historian Hayes, the project has special significance. “It’s important because it calls attention to a special society that was culturally rich – one where Christians, Muslims and Jews lived side-by-side in relative harmony and where a fascinating cultural fusion occurred over a century or so.”

According to Hayes, while the project is rooted in medieval history, it also draws on 21st-Century STEM disciplines. “The Norman Sicily Project represents a society from almost a millennium ago via cutting-edge technologies that will be connected to other data sets on the web,” she says.

It also has a sustainability component that will be guided by Pope. “We’ll enter information from field visits, seismic data and, whenever possible, results from on-site sustainability assessments of the conditions of the monuments’ stones and the greatest environmental threats to their survival,” Hayes explains.

Hayes looks forward to beginning work on the project in September. “We’re not just exploring these monuments as relics of a past age; we’re also assessing their ability to endure climactic, geologic, seismic and – in some cases – volcanic threats.”