The First BOE Meeting Offered Parents Little Hope For Change

Angela Penna and her bloc will continue the practice of the former BOE President in allowing the Attorney to act as an unelected BOE member. There were several instances during the meeting where she and the Attorney rudely interrupted Berkeley Heights parents.

The purpose of this is to likely occupy time so that the parent has less opportunity to speak and to reduce the efficacy of the parent’s oratory. In the clip below, the Attorney comically attempts to pull the “you can’t criticize personnel card.”

First, that is untrue, and at the start of each meeting, a statement is read by the BOE president that conveys that the BOE is not liable for such comments.

Why?

Because they are ALLOWED, the best the BOE can do is distance themselves from comments of this nature.

Secondly, the Superintendent is a PUBLIC figure- this has already been validated in several court cases.

The most disturbing part of this clip is the “we are doing this for all the right reasons” speech by Penna. A bizarre “how can I be polite while going on a monologue so that the relevant points being made by people about my bad actions are lost?” speech was made complete with empathic facial expressions.

This also occurred with one other resident’s remarks where the Attorney stepped in to debate a resident on his personal belief that the resident was contradicting himself. Is that what we are paying the Attorney to do? Suppose there is going to be a debate. In that case, it should occur with our elected representatives, not someone who does not even live in our District, profiting from the mistakes they have made in leaving our District open to ethics complaints and lawsuits that they then capitalize on to make a profit.

While the BOE finally agreed to CONSIDER an increase in BOE meetings (basically giving the public back what they always had), the new practice of not allowing speakers to come up a second time -especially after being cut off and lectured with misinformed diatribes- is like someone stealing your sandwich, eating half of it then trying to convince you that you should be happy that you have a sandwich.

The following video of the resident’s remarks was provided to BHCW with permission to publish.