01/19/2023 BOE Meeting- What Parents Should Be Aware of Going In To This Meeting

There is a 15-page agenda with a 106-page attachment. BHCW reached out to the District last night as the policy revisions were STILL not publicly available until today. Buried in this mountain of paper parents should pay attention to the following: 

Resolution A: Approve the Annual Appointment of Stephen Hopkins as Records Custodian.  

This is a new appointment and a role formerly held by Julie Kot, Board Secretary and Business Administrator. This is an important issue because Ms. Kot requested a stipend due to the extra work created by her fulfilling OPRA Requests. To this, she remarked at a Board committee meeting that some OPRAS take upwards of 95 hours to complete. When asked, Ms. Kot could not produce what OPRA took her 95 hours. In addition, she emailed a resident claiming that legal bills – the subject of at least one OPRA request – are redacted and prepared by the district lawyers.  

Mr. Hopkins currently holds the role of District Supervisor for grades 1-12 World Languages, District Supervisor grades 6-12 Social Studies and is the chairperson for the district DEI initiative.  He is also listed as the Director of Special Projects on the District website. 

Will Mr. Hopkins be producing OPRA requests now? This is a questionable and strange appointment for a role whose work should be done by the Board secretary or someone from the Business office, where the actual records are kept.  

Is this a conflict of interest for a member of the Admin team, a curricular supervisor and chair of DEI to be on the front lines of OPRA requests? 

The Board also created a full-time assistant to the business administrator last year. So again, what’s the rationale for creating this additional position? How many hours of work is this, and what’s the current staffing in our board office? One must make an informed decision with a clear picture. The District needs to produce the OPRA log of – Total requests received, remitted responses, requests denied, and how many extensions were requested and ultimately denied. Unless a monthly OPRA log is produced and compared with the total business office staff workload, the public cannot evaluate the need for the position in the first place. 

This special position was created with only five board members voting on this position late last year. Two new board members were elected since that time, one of whom still needs to be sworn in.  

Business Resolution B: Acceptance of donation for fabric to CMS.  

This isn’t a big deal but in contrast to the District refusing a donation from another parent due to “equity” as in the gift not benefitting ALL the students, just a select few. We need to ask ourselves who is determining what donations get approved and if there is a procedure. This isn’t the first time Melissa Varley has used “equity” as a weapon to refuse things she doesn’t want to involve herself in. ALL gift requests should be brought forth for public discussion; the Superintendent should not be the gatekeeper on a BOE decision. 

Perhaps the most concerning items on the agenda, outside of Steve Hopkins appointment are the sheer number of edits to policy. Policies were missing in the attachments posted on the district website until an email was sent requesting that they be posted by BHCW.  

0162 Notice of Board Meeting, first reading 

These edits do not require the Board secretary to notify the public of the meeting in writing, only the Board and “each person who has duly requested such notification.” The language states meetings will still be posted in the newspaper. Oddly, the names of the newspapers are not listed and we are moving away from displaying the public notice at town halls, library and board office. Also, the new language inserted includes “telegram, fax, hand-delivered” are we moving back to 1900’s to just DENY tax-paying residents a public notice of board meetings?  

8420.10 Active Shooter 

The current policy has been completely blacked out and the new policy states that active shooter procedures should be part of the District plans. The same goes for Bomb Threats (8420.2), Lockdown procedures (8420.2) 

See South Orange’s policy as a comparison. 

The biggest problem is that language has been removed in all EMERGENCY AND CRISIS policies that require the Superintendent to contact local law enforcement immediately following an incident at our schools. We know she failed to do this after the 9/26/22 incident in our schools involving a boxcutter. She has proven to not be supportive or respectful to the BHPD in the past, and removing this language is unacceptable to some of us. Is Melissa Varley supporting this language removal? Is it so that she is no longer accountable for failing our kids and not following district policy?  

Why are they removing this language? Is the intent to keep the parents in the dark? Whether you support or have concerns about increased security in our schools, all sides can agree that clarity on these policies is necessary. 

Contributors:

Laura Kapuscinski
Sai Akiri
John Migueis
Shauna Williams

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