Fair Lawn School District Loses a Friend

Sandy Ferro got about as affirmative a sendoff as any district employee could ever hope to receive Thursday when her retirement was announced at the Fair Lawn Board of Education meeting.  

Board members, who have developed close working relationships with Ferro over her 21 years as the superintendent's assistant, took turns praising her calming influence with parents, exceptional conscientiousness and complete professionalism in dealing with sensitive school-related issues.

Longtime board member John Mancinelli equated her retirement to losing a friend.

"You don’t really know what you’re going to do the next time you come in and she’s not there," he said. "I truly have a sense of loss and I expect to miss her tremendously."

Superintendent Bruce Watson, who hired Ferro in 1992 and has worked more closely with her than anyone in the district, joked that Ferro has become like his second wife.

"I said [to my wife], 'I now know what a bigamist is, or how they feel, because I leave you and go to work and I have some more wives at work,'" Watson said. "Sandy was clearly one of them."

In her role as Waton's assistant, Ferro has frequent contact with parents, teachers and administrators who seek the superintendent.

"I try to make his job a little bit easier," she said. "It’s pretty tough running a whole district like he does, and if I could maybe talk to a parent or ease a parent’s fears in some way or alleviate some of their issues, it doesn’t have to go to Bruce because they’re satisfied with what I told them."

Joyce Beam, the district's director of special services, called Ferro "every new administrator's best friend," because of her wealth of institutional knowledge about the district.

"When you arrive and Bruce isn’t right there to ask a question to, Sandy knows the why, the history, the wherefore," Beam said. "[Sandy] is going to be a loss to our team at the central office."

Ferro, whose last day is June 30, said she's had about as much trouble going through with her retirement as the district has had sending her off.

She initially considered leaving a few years ago when the governor began initiating education reforms, but ultimately decided that she just wasn't ready back then.

"Every time someone would say to me, 'Congratulations,' I’d be in tears," Ferro said. "I wasn’t ready to go yet."

Three years later, she's mustered the resolve to make it official.

"I’m going to miss everyone terribly," she said. "I love what I’m doing and that’s why it was a very, very hard decision for me...but I just think it’s time to go, time to move on."

Ferro, a longtime Wyckoff resident, actually began her career on Wall Street, but decided to leave finance some 30 years ago in search of a job that would allow her to spend more time with her kids.

"It's funny because the first thing I thought about was, 'I’ll go work in a school. They don’t really do that much,'" she said. "I didn’t realize how much work it is actually working in a school and how much gets done there with so many interruptions."

Ferro worked in the Wyckoff School District for about 13 years before coming to Fair Lawn in 1992, where she worked under Watson, who at the time was the district's business administrator.

Watson still fondly recalls putting together an assessment test for secretarial candidates that involved typing, dictation and a number of other tasks.

"We went through a couple of [applicants] and I just sat there and I said ‘This is not going to be good because I need somebody who can keep up with me,'" he said. "And then Sandy came in, we gave Sandy the test and she blew it off the charts. Everything we did she just blew it off the charts."

She's been Watson's right hand ever since and the two have bonded professionally over a shared admiration for each other's work.

Part of the reason Ferro said she hasn't retired sooner is that she loves working with Watson, whom she called a "fantastic administrator."

"When I first came here I liked Wyckoff and I thought, ‘Gee, they do so much there and they’re not doing all of this in Fair Lawn,’" she said. "But working with Bruce and seeing the way he operates, I think we have come such a long way in the 21 years, and he has brought so much to the district."

Ferro said she's not entirely sure how she'll spend her retirement, but she's looking forward to seeing more of her four young grandkids, enrolling in adult education classes and finishing the children's books she started writing years ago.

"I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up," Ferro said, "I’m going to be taking it day by day."

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