A longtime Deerpark resident and a fixture in the community, Florence Santini said she is running for another school board term to continue serving students and taxpayers.

She first ran for the board in 2004 to get a handle on the spiraling school taxes, only to find out that the world couldn’t be changed overnight and the only thing under her control was to keep trying.

While mindful of seniors on fixed incomes that struggle to pay taxes, she also came to look at things from the perspective of students.

“First of all, you have to take care of the students,” Santini told The Epoch Times. “We must make sure that they have all their schooling, all their programs, and all that they need to get by and graduate.”

As a board member, she said she always tried to strike a balance between the two.

“You try to do the best you can,” she said. “You try, you keep trying, you don’t stop, and you keep trying to make the best decisions you can—that is it.”

The Port Jervis School District serves families who reside in Deerpark and Port Jervis in Orange County.

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Clifton, New Jersey, Santini moved to the Town of Deerpark in the 1970s to run a restaurant with her husband, Dominick Santini.

For over 20 years, her husband was the cook and Santini the manager at Santini’s Ristorante, an Italian eatery on Route 6 in Port Jervis.

After selling the restaurant, the couple decided to stay in the area they’d grown to like.

“You walk down the street, and somebody says hello to you; people are always there to lend a helping hand—this is what this community is like, and this is why we stayed,” she said.

Soon she got involved in the town government, being elected as tax collector in 1999, and then town clerk in 2002, a post she has held until now.

She enjoys serving the residents as a town clerk, a job much like her role at the Italian eatery, she said.

“It’s like I came from the restaurant, which was a people-person job, to the town clerk, which is also a people-person job,” Santini said. “I treat everyone as a human being; I often say, take your title off—be it a doctor or a lawyer—and everything underneath is the same.”

She is also involved in various civic and charitable organizations, such as Catholic Daughters, Ladies Auxiliary Veteran of Foreign Wars Post 161, and Hudson Valley Honor Flight.

In 2004, Santini ran for the school board for the first time when the district proposed a tax levy hike of more than $1 million, or 8.45 percent.

“I was worried about it,” she said. “If I was worried about this, my next-door neighbor was worried about it, and the person down the streets was worried about it.”

Voters defeated the budget and elected Santini and several others onto the board.

About a month later, a budget with a lower hike of 6.45 percent was approved by voters.

“I came in with a chip on my shoulder and said, ‘I’m going to do this, this, and this,’” Santini said. “Then I learned what I could do and what I could not do—it was very much of an eye-opener.”

“You have contracts, you have unions, you have your due diligence of taking care of regular classes and kids with special needs,” she said. “There can be no sway, and those funds have to be there.”

Much to Santini’s dismay, the next budget proposed to hike the tax levy again by almost a third.

Voters defeated it by a 3:2 margin and then approved another budget with a slightly lower hike, at 27 percent, according to a Times-Herald Record article at the time.

“After a while, I became humble, and I came to terms with the fact that you could only do so much,” she said. “But you are a voice to be heard. You are talking and trying, not sitting back and just being a yes person.”

After a pause, Santini ran for school board again in 2014 and was elected to another three-year term.

She was reelected in 2017 and then again in 2020, during which she got 1,156 votes, the most among all seven candidates, according to the Times-Herald Record.

In the past 10 years, the district kept the tax levy hike under 2 percent, with four years of zero increases, according to a recent budget presentation by the district administration.

Even so, Santini argues that voters bear the consequences of the dramatic hikes of the past to this day.

Running for another term, she said she hoped to continue to serve the district residents.

“You don’t get paid, and there is nothing you get from it other than trying to make a difference for the kids and trying to get what our residents of the district need,” she said.

If reelected, she most looked forward to the completion of the middle school building renovation on Main Street in Port Jervis, Santini said.

Estimated to cost $55 million, it is one of the largest capital projects ever undertaken by the district.

“I am going to be proud that students will learn in classrooms that are fresh and bright, they will have enough room in between desks, and they will have a gym that they can use, and a nice cafeteria where they eat and take a break,” she said.