Shelley Mayer was elected to the New York State Senate to represent the 37th District in an April 2018 Special Election, and she was subsequently re-elected in November 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024. Before serving in the State Senate, she served in the State Assembly for six years representing the City of Yonkers exclusively. Her Senate district includes northeast Yonkers, Eastchester, Scarsdale, all of the Sound Shore communities, White Plains, North Castle and Pound Ridge.
For her entire professional career, as an attorney, activist and community leader, Shelley has been a leader in the fight for New York families. Once elected to the State Legislature, she continued as a leader on behalf of children, parents, and schools. In January of 2019, Shelley was appointed as the Chair of the Senate Education Committee in 2019 and has served in this role since then. Shelley has also been a leader in the fight to protect reproductive health, including abortion; to protect our EMS workers; to reject unconscionable utility rates; and to stand up for our immigrant neighbors.
Shelley helped lead the fight for the full funding of Foundation Aid, the funds the State of New York owes to its public schools, which was finally fully achieved in 2024. She has fought to expand pre-K outside New York City, strengthen day care and after-school care, been a strong voice for school boards, teachers and parents on education issues, and authored the bill to delink teacher evaluations from standardized test results.
Previously, from 2013 to 2017,while in the Assembly, Shelley served as the Chair of the Assembly Education Subcommittee on Students with Special Needs. During this time, she advocated for the schools serving the state’s most vulnerable students (Special Act, 4201, 853, and 4410 Schools) successfully increased their state funding for the first time in many years. While representing the Yonkers Public Schools in the Assembly, Shelley prioritized delivering for the city’s 26,000+ public school students and wrote the law that authorized the construction of three new public schools in New York’s third largest city.
Earlier in her career Shelley served as Chief Counsel to the New York State Senate Democrats, as Senior Counsel at the National State Attorney General Program at Columbia Law School, and as Vice President of Government and Community Affairs at Continuum Health Partners (previously St. Luke’s-Rosevelt Hospital Center and Beth Israel Medical Center), some of New York City’s largest teaching hospital systems, working to protect Medicaid and Medicare services.
From 1982 to 1994, Shelley was an Assistant Attorney General in the office of New York Attorney General Bob Abrams where she handled major reproductive health litigation. Shelley served in the Civil Rights Bureau, as Chief of the Westchester Regional Office, as the legislative liaison for the Attorney General, and ultimately as a senior advisor to the Attorney General.
Shelley received a JD from SUNY Buffalo School of Law in 1979 and a Bachelor of Arts from UCLA in 1975.
Shelley lives in her childhood home in Yonkers with her husband, Lee Smith. Shelley and Lee have three adult children – Aaron, Julia, and Arthur Smith -- and five wonderful grandchildren.