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SEPTEMBER 2018
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COMMUNITYNEWS.ORG
New superintendent settles in Administrator has 23-year career in education
By SaMaNtha SciarrOtta
ssciarrotta@communitynews.org
Aug. 13 was like the first day of school for Ross Kasun. It was his debut at the Lawrence Township Public Schools offices after being named the district’s new superintendent at a special school board meeting Aug. 8, and he made the rounds, putting faces to names and meeting new people. “I got to sit with the administrative team and pick their brains as much as possible and try to learn,” he said. “I got to see my office for the first time and put some names to faces.
Really, a lot of excitement. Everybody has been so welcoming and nice, and their level of dedication towards the kids in this district has really been impressive.” Kasun comes to Lawrence after several years as the Freehold Township superintendent. “I love the size of this district,” he said. “I like to be in the classrooms, I like to get to know the students. The diversity of this district really attracted to me. It is kind of a melting pot, the most diverse group of all the county schools. It causes challenges, but it also creates opportunities. The district wants to be one of the best in the nation. It wants to have that brand. It wants to have teachers wanting to come here, parents wanting to come here, kids coming here and graduating
and going to the best schools and doing great things. I think the goals of the district match my own. It’s a district where the board of education and the parents are supportive.” Prior to his seven-year stint in Freehold, Kasun spent three years as the superintendent in Colts Neck and was the assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction in Summit. His administrative career started as a principal in South Orange-Maplewood and then in Millburn. Before all of that, though, Kasun found himself facing a career in finance. He graduated from Seton Hall University with a degree in business, and he started his career in sales, which is what he did for about six years after college. See KASUN, Page 5
From a life of law to a life of love Former divorce lawyer forging career as a romance writer By ScOtt MOrGaN
Nora Dugas blows bubbles at Weeden Park during a Music in the Park Aug. 9, 2018. For more photos, turn to Page 10. (Photo by Suzette J. Lucas.)
One dusty old chestnut about making it in life is that overnight success is a 20-year business. Maria Imbalzano laughs at that kind of nonsense. It only took her half that time. “Ten years after I thought I’d made it I finally got published,” she said. And the book was the fi fth one she wrote. “I have a lot to say about persistence.” Indeed she does, and long has. Before she put her name on romance novels, Imbalzano spent 30-odd years in family and divorce law as an attorney at
Stark & Stark. Over much of that time she did a lot of public speaking, and much of it centered on how to just keep forging ahead in life, family, and work. Imbalzano grew up in Hamilton and Trenton, where her father was “Joe the Barber,” a man nearly everyone in Trenton knew. She earned her bachelor’s in psychology at Rutgers in 1976 and had designs on becoming a counselor. But, needing to get straight to work, she enrolled in a paralegal school in Philadelphia that guaranteed a job to graduates. She was placed at a Park Avenue law firm in New York. Bitten by the lawyer bug, Imbalzano went to law school at Fordham, but Joe the Barber wanted her to come back to Mercer County, so she took
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a summer job at Stark & Stark. That fall the firm offered her a full-time job, and there she stayed until this year. Now that she is officially not a career divorce attorney, Imbalzano is a full-time romance author. Her third published novel came out in July. And if you’re doing the math, that means her latest, Sworn to Forget, is actually book No. 7 in her oeuvre. That’s not a bad output for someone who says she wasn’t any good at creative writing. She sure read a lot of it, though. Romance novels were her go-to at night, after a long day in a job where none of her clients were ever in a good mood and nobody ended up happily ever after. So her escape from constant See WRITER, Page 6
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