Three seats. Five candidates. One May 19 vote that’ll decide who oversees the Oyster Bay-East Norwich school budget and sets policy for thousands of students.
The filing deadline closed Monday, April 20, locking in a field that includes incumbents Nancy Castrogiovanni and Maryann Santos alongside three challengers: Todd Cronin, Ann Marie Longo, and Alina Vegliante. Whoever wins a seat serves a four-year term running through 2027. Voters casting ballots on May 19 will also weigh in on the proposed 2026-2027 school budget and any other district propositions on that day’s slate.
Longo isn’t a stranger to the Nassau County Board of Education. She put in 12 years on the Oyster Bay-East Norwich board, including time as board president, and she’s now running again. That’s not a small thing. She raised her children in the district. Her grandchildren attend district schools today. So when she says the administration isn’t being straight with community members who ask hard questions, she’s speaking from the inside, not the cheap seats.
“I’m not confident in the information I get when I ask questions,” Longo told Long Island Press. “The only way to enact change is to run for the school board.”
That’s a pointed thing to say when you’ve spent over a decade inside the very system you’re now calling out. Transparency isn’t just a talking point for her campaign. It’s the reason she’s running.
Vegliante, an attorney with two sons in district schools, came to the race from a different angle. Her kids have generally had a good experience in Oyster Bay-East Norwich classrooms, she’s said. That’s not what drove her to file. What pushed her was the district’s elementary school technology policy. Screens, specifically.
She started digging into what research from child development specialists actually says about screen exposure in early education, and she didn’t find reassurance. She found alarm.
“The more I looked into the research on the use of screens in early education, the more I learned of its detriments and the lack of any support for the claimed benefits,” she said. “I soon learned that my concerns were shared by a large number of parents in the district.”
She’s not running on one issue alone, though. She’s been deliberate about saying so.
“While the issue of technology in early education is what caused me to run, being a board member means confronting tough challenges and overseeing numerous other needs of the community,” she said.
The screen-time debate isn’t unique to Oyster Bay. Parent groups across Long Island and the country have been raising the same concerns, and child development researchers have added fuel with studies questioning how much device exposure young children can handle. The New York State School Boards Association has flagged technology policy as one of the more contested areas districts are navigating right now. Whether Vegliante’s argument converts into votes on May 19 depends on how many local parents have been thinking about the same question.
Cronin rounds out the five-candidate field. Three of these candidates win. Two go home.
The 2022 board elections in Oyster Bay-East Norwich drew modest turnout, and contested races like this one can shift those numbers. Budget votes on the same day tend to pull more residents to the polls, which means both campaigns and incumbents can’t count on a quiet day.
Castrogiovanni and Santos carry the advantage of name recognition and four years of board service. But Longo’s 12 years of institutional knowledge cuts both ways: she knows where to look, she knows the questions to ask, and she’s made clear she doesn’t think she’s been getting straight answers. That’s a credible attack from a credible source, and it’ll be hard for district officials to dismiss her as an outsider who doesn’t understand how schools work.
The May 19 vote is the deadline that matters. Everything between now and then is campaign noise.