Taking Malverne talk to Facebook

Many people assume a community as small as Malverne is tight-knit: a place where everyone knows everyone and they all talk about everything.

For the most part, this is true of the 1-square-mile village, which has a population of about 9,000. But some Malverne residents have taken communication to another level — through Facebook. As of press time, three Facebook groups dedicated to all things Malverne were up and active, with hundreds of members and dozens of posts.

Although the groups all share the aim of creating a comfortable forum for the exchange of information and ideas, each differs in its mission. “I Love Malverne but hate brown water (from LI Water)” the first of the groups, was born in February after a Malverne resident got fed up with poor service from the village’s water supplier. After garnering tremendous support from village residents and significant press coverage, creator Tom Grech accomplished his mission — bringing light to a problem and getting it fixed.

Seeing the success of Grech’s group, village resident Don Pupke took to Facebook to shed light on and start discussions about a separate matter. On March 27, he created the group “I Love Malverne But Want Better Schools!”

“I welcome both positive and negative critiques of the school district because there are a lot of positives to the school district that people need to know about, and I’m not going to let this turn into a bash-the-school-district page,” Pupke said. “This is an informational page meant to educate people on the issues related to the school district and to kind of let them know what’s going on there.”

Pupke admitted, however, that he started the page out of frustration with the Board of Education. “They need sunshine in this place because they act in a vacuum sometimes,” he said, “and they don’t realize that the taxpayers, actually, would like to know what’s going on, and have a relationship with them that goes beyond just showing up in May and voting on the budget.

Regardless of its intentions, the name of Pupke’s group irked lifelong Malverne resident Lori Hung Lang, who claimed it — much like Grech’s group’s name — would bring the village negative attention.

“Whenever you say ‘I love, but,’ that has a negative connotation to it,” Lang said.

So she decided to create her own group: “I Love Malverne … the Village, the Schools & the Police Department!”

“It’s all about branding and it’s all about marketing and having a more positive spin on what do you have and making it better,” Lang said. “So I just created this page so that there’s a group out there that’s positive for the village, where positive good news about the village can be posted.”

Although all the pages are meant to be informational, and places where people can post both complaints and compliments, some people mistake them for opportunities to rant, according to Lang, whose sister is a teacher in the Malverne school district. “Everyone says ‘nothing’s personal, nothing’s personal,’” she said, “but it does become personal when you put a lot of time and effort into your job and into the kids.”

As for the issues themselves, Lang said it’s important to discuss improvement and to have a “civic mind.” She just wants discussion to take place in a forum that appears less critical — something she discussed with Pupke shortly after he created his group. As a result, Pupke agreed to change the group name to “I Love Malverne But Want More From Our Schools.”

“It’s the content that matters, not the name of the page,” Pupke said.

Whatever their content, the Facebook pages have brought the community together and important matters to the forefront. In Grech’s case, the page ended up fostering a movement of sorts and eventually led to a solution. Pupke is hoping for a similar outcome from his page and Lang is confident all the pages will accomplish their creators’ goals.

“You can get more done if you do it positively — not everything has to be a fight,” she said. “And you can actually achieve more and pull more people into your campaign and your effort, if you word your campaign carefully. You get more done if there’s more hands helping.”