Nick Dovidio
Nick has been a Board Director for the Westfield Area Y for the past 26 years. He currently serves on its Executive Committee and is Chair of its Long-range Planning and Financial Development Committees. Previously, he was Board Chairperson and Chair of the Child Care Committee.
Over the last six years, Nick has mentored executives in the Stanford Graduate School of Business Executive Management Programs and currently serves as a Board Director of Stanford Alumni Startups New York. Previously, he spent most of his career as a Managing Director and Operating Partner in private equity. He was an executive and/or Board Director for 12 companies, including La Petite Academy, Inc., which provided 90,000 students with early childhood education at 750 schools across 33 states.
Suad Gacham
Suad has devoted the last 12 years of her career to expanding and improving out of school time opportunities as Director of School Based Services at Jewish Family & Children’s Services of Northern New Jersey (JFCS). As a result of her leadership, the Club Ed Afterschool Program has grown to serve approximately 1000 students across 6 public school districts. Since 2003, her mission in the nonprofit sector has been to increase prospects for children and families in socioeconomically challenged areas.
She has experience in designing, generating, and implementing curricula for students in grades K to 12. Her experience also includes professional development for teachers and childcare workers. Suad join the NJSACC Board to help support out of school programming because she believes that families should have a safe and affordable place where their children can grow socially, emotionally, and academically.
Krista Glynn
Krista is a Child Care Service Area Director for Catholic Charities Diocese of Metuchen. She currently oversees 17 child care programs in four counties that serve approximately 1300 children including early learning centers, before and after school programs, and summer programs . Krista has worked for Catholic Charities for over 20 years and has volunteered her time with a focus on improving the quality of child care services both statewide and nationally. Krista has been instrumental in expanding her child care services over the years in both school age programming and the preschool sector. Her preschool center is a 3 star Grow NJ Kids program while nine of her school age programs previously received national accreditation through the National Afterschool Association (NAA).
Krista has a Bachelor’s in Education and Art and received her Master’s in Business Administration in 2016. She has been a dedicated board member for many years and involved with NJSACC since 1999. Krista continues to focus on improving her programming in an effort to meet the needs of the families her organization serves and recognizes the importance of quality school age care in the out of school hours.
Jim McGlynn
Jim is the Manager of Public Consulting Group’s (PCG) Education Service Practice. Since 1999, Jim has held local leadership roles with Liberty Science Center, Huntington Learning Corporation, Citizen Schools, New Jersey After 3, and PCG. Through this work, he has partnered with and has served local school systems, state agencies, and the non-profit sector in a variety of contexts spanning the traditional school day, afterschool time, and summer learning.
Jim is a career educator and social entrepreneur who brings to NJSACC considerable experience in the recruitment, training and supervision of educators and administrators; the design and delivery of classroom-based and online curriculum; strategic planning; fundraising; the design and execution of state and city-wide data collection and evaluation systems. Jim is a lifelong New Jersey resident, and a proud product of New Jersey’s K-12 school system and Rutgers University, where his undergraduate and graduate work focused on physics, chemistry and education. Jim resides in Somerset County with his wife, Julia, and their three energetic and adventurous children.
Denise Sellers
Denise has dedicated her career to working with children since her graduation from The College of William and Mary in 1973. She has been the Executive Director of Haddonfield Child Care, a private, not-for-profit before and after school program serving the school district of Haddonfield, NJ, for over thirty years. Prior to entering the world of out of school time, was a preschool teacher and special events coordinator at the YMCA, and teacher of the handicapped at a private school for children with extraordinary special needs.
Denise has been an active member of the afterschool community on both a state and national level, serving as an early and decades-long member and co-chair of the NJSACC Board of Trustees, which she left for several years but returned to in 2015. On a national level, she was an ASQ Advisor, an endorser for the NAA Accreditation process, a member of the committee which developed the NAA Code of Ethics, and an Afterschool Ambassador for the Afterschool Alliance. Denise has served as a representative for school-age on PINJ and the MAP to Inclusive Child Care, where she was instrumental in the development of the curriculum and certification for Administration of Medication in Child Care. She was also a fellow of the Afterschool Matters/PhilWP Fellowship, which led to her article, “Nana for a New Generation,” published in 2010 in Afterschool Matters.
She believes strongly that “it takes a village to raise a child,” so her personal life reflects the same level of commitment to children, whether through her work on various committees of her women’s club promoting literacy and girls’ leadership, or the board of Bancroft School providing opportunities for people with special needs, as well as the time she devotes as “Nana” to her two school-age grandchildren and helping out at their elementary schools.
Dr. Nyeema Watson
Dr. Nyeema C. Watson is the vice chancellor of diversity, inclusion, and civic engagement at Rutgers University–Camden, where she oversees efforts to build an inclusive campus community while connecting the resources of the university with communities in Camden and across southern New Jersey.
Working with students, faculty, and staff, Watson leads campus efforts to establish diversity, equity, and inclusion as key institutional values in recruitment, retention, the curriculum, and civic and community engagement.
The Office of Civic Engagement focuses on engaged civic learning, volunteerism and service, community-based research, and integrated partnerships focused on addressing local issues. Watson is an experienced leader in civic and community engagement, higher education administration, anchor institution partnerships, student success initiatives, policy and program development, and research on issues relating to minority children and youth who live in high poverty areas. She speaks across the country on the role of urban higher education institutions as anchor institutions, especially as it relates to forging partnerships with K-12 institutions on how to create educational pipelines for underrepresented youth to higher education. She is committed to diversity, access and inclusion, and supporting individual, communities, and institutions working in partnership to achieve shared goals for positive transformation.