Marlboro teacher attains national certification

MARLBORO — The Marlboro K-8 School District announced last week that Defino Central Elementary School third-grade teacher Karen Jarosz has achieved national certification by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards in 2006. Of the 108,000 teachers in New Jersey, only 111 are nationally certified.

Jarosz has been a teacher for 20 years, and for the past six years has taught in Marlboro. She received a bachelor of arts degree in education and a master of arts degree in education from Georgian Court College (now University), Lakewood.

Jarosz is the fifth teacher in the Marlboro K-8 School District to achieve this distinction, joining fifth-grade teacher Kristi Silva, who received national certification in 2005; art teacher Philip Silva, who received national certification in 2004; and two retirees, social studies teacher Jane Baricelli and science teacher Arlene Knittel, both of whom received their certification in 2001.

According to a press release from the Marlboro K-8 School District, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization governed by a board of directors, the majority of whom are classroom teachers.

Their mission is to advance the quality of teaching and learning by maintaining high and rigorous standards for what accomplished teachers should know and be able to do, providing a national voluntary system certifying teachers who meet these standards, and advocating related education reforms to integrate national board certification in American education and to capitalize on the expertise of national board certified teachers.

NBPTS is the only organization of its kind that helps states identify and certify highly accomplished teachers. National board certification is used as a way to attract, reward and retain highly accomplished teachers as required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, according to the school district.

National certification is achieved by completing a qualification process that takes between 200 and 400 hours to complete, over the course of one or more years. Teachers must complete an extensive series of performance-based assessments that probe the depth of their subject matter knowledge as well as their ability to manage, measure and improve student learning, according to the press release.