the Budget, Stupid.

Berkeley Heights, NJ Should Go Back to Having a Public Vote on The School Budget

You are part of a group of investors that provide a Company 60 million dollars annually. 

You hire a new CEO and CFO, and within a few years, the Company’s legal bills increase 88%, the quality of your core services is reduced (math proficiencies declining, kids are sardine canned in language classrooms and schools). Needed services are not funded (COVID Learning Gap Interventions, Transportation Cuts) while your competitors had programs in place before your new fiscal year (school year) even started. 

You then find out your Company’s CEO misled you about her specific legal issues for one full year after you paid her legal tab and refuses to tell you how much her legal bills cost (the bills YOU paid for). You find out your Board of Directors is enthusiastically complicit. As the legal bills pile up, they lament the $25 box of caterpillars while approving one assistant after another for a CEO and CFO that can’t get their jobs done.

This Board also punishes Board Members who try to correct the issues while giving accolades and awards to Board Members who led the Company to be cited by government agencies. The majority membership are the subject of multiple validated ethics complaints and were forced to change their practices by prosecutors.

Next you discover that the CEO’s brilliant ideas are forcing your customers to pay other vendors money to compensate for her inability to implement these brilliant and barely researched ideas (Botched Reconfiguration, Rushed and Poorly Implemented Building Thinking Classrooms and parents running around trying to hire Tutors). She also attempted to remove services customers valued (French), and when she was held to task, provided after-the-fact information that was faulty and, perhaps, even deceptive.

When customers and investors raise concerns at meetings, they get wrong information, are placed on time limits with demeaning alarms and the attorneys you are paying for interrupt and berate those expressing those concerns. The CEO insults the very people paying the bills (“small group of angry parents”). In one case, the CEO leaked emails from a customer to the Press and then denied it publicly despite the customer having evidence of the email in hand and the recipient present in the same room.

When you try to get information about all this via paper trail (OPRA), the very lawyers you are paying to ensure your CEO and BOE are on track are burning through the dollars you gave them to run interference with you getting that information and protecting the very people they should be admonishing. They even go a step further in trying to make those attempting to get information the problem – publishing incomplete OPRA logs and blaming parents for the artificial and manufactured costs of their overuse of redactions and delays.

The End.

Last year in a frantic (and somewhat strange) attempt to harm the credibility of community members concerned about the lack of transparency and public input into the Budget, several talking points were making their way through social media.

(1) It was perfectly normal and reasonable for BOE Members to get the (incomplete) Budget a few days before having to vote on it- they should vote how the finance committee and Superintendent tell them to.

(2) It’s perfectly normal not to email or share the tentative budget with elected board members.

(3) It was perfectly normal and reasonable for members of the Finance Committee not to be able to bring copies of the entire budget home with them, and members of the public should not be allowed to see the total Budget (the state of NJ disagreed).

(4) That BOE members with concerns about the Budget should only express them in committee meetings and not in public (that led to Ms. Penna’s hilarious reaction to Dr. Foregger expressing his concerns). Apparently, Dr. Foregger had some duty to keep his differences in-house and away from the people paying for the Budget.

We should all be clear that the Budget is where the rubber hits the road regarding academics, and our spending manifests our priorities. While controversial books or who the school is named after are all exciting conversations, BOE Members are elected to take on the more tedious task of aligning the District’s spending with parents’ expectations of their children’s education. While the other conversations are important to have, they are not the main priority of the Board of Education given our current context- some may argue it is a cynical use of a significant issue to distract away from fundamental problems.

Distractions are perhaps necessary when an organization with a 60 Million Dollar Budget can’t adequately quantify its mission and underfunds core services so that it can funnel money to hire and protect Administrators, and BOE Members and pay attorneys to go on fishing expeditions to harm BOE Members they don’t agree with or yell at parents during meetings. 

2022 was another year of a multitude of actions and decisions by our BOE and Superintendent that would, in a normal context, lead to BOE Members losing their seats and the Superintendent losing her job.

How did it get to this point?

Since moving away from the public vote, our proficiencies and rankings have plummeted. However, the ability of the school district to accumulate buckets of money that can be used to bypass referendums and fund pet projects has grown – what Sai accurately referred to in our last episode of Night Watch as a “slush fund.”

The BOE no longer has to worry about putting an acceptable budget out to the public – they can do what they want with confidence in the belief that the public no longer knows or believes they can take their authority back in this area. In fact, last year the Business Administrator and Superintendent went to great lengths in support of the idea that the public should not get the full detailed budget before it was voted on. Even BOE members had to go to the District office and review it there as if it was some sacred text and those BOE members who were not part of the Finance Committee apparently had no right to question the Budget.

Towns in NJ have remained with or moved back to having the public vote on the school budget.

We can do the same thing and I think we should.

That vote becomes our most powerful ally in making sure our District is using our resources wisely.

But there is a second part to the answer.

It’s our fault for accepting the narrative that they know best.

We did not attend the public finance committee meetings – so they canceled them thinking most people wouldn’t even notice (they were right).

We barely attend BOE meetings now despite the booming traffic and positive feedback I get on our articles almost daily. 

When parents finally began asking difficult questions and making facts and their opinions known, social media comments were locked, parents were thrown out of community forums, and BOE Members would respond to emails with a 

“Hey cool i got your email and pretended to read it…..I can’t put my response in writing but I’m down for a meeting where I can feed you horseshit off the record -thanks and have a great day!

[Insert Board Member Name Here]

“

if at all.

 When a parent does show up to a meeting, they will likely experience an overpriced attorney interrupt and bark bad legal advice at them for 1.5 minutes of their 3 minutes of the allotted time.

We stopped paying attention and made BOE elections a popularity contest. We get all riled up about committees, books, and slogans and buy into the idea that asking for evidence before making a decision means being against humanity. When you make the standard of electing people a middle school theater, that’s exactly what you end up electing.

We also bought the argument that putting a light on all these problems harms our school more than the problems themselves. It is somehow beneath a community to point out when their elected representatives are breaking the institutions they were elected to protect and that our community and children are better served by pretending everything is just fine.

Despite this, we continue to not only vote for candidates who support this mindset but defend them and frame any criticism of this circus as “hurting our schools” – if facts hurt the school, you might want to change the facts, not silence the people articulating them.

So here’s yet another opportunity to either show up or do what we always do (see above). It all starts with the Budget, and it is coming up soon.

 If we let this go again and turn a blind eye to how they are throwing away the money that should be funding our children’s education, we’ve already lost 70% of the battle for the next ten months.

Consider the facts yourself if you want to rescue our District, and take three minutes to write an email. At the very least, attend one of the budget meetings, attend BOE Meetings and open your mouth – say something. Be sure to give the Attorney a few minutes to scream incorrect information at you that will get the District into more legal trouble – like “you can’t criticize the Superintendent” (lol).

And when you are provided an answer – IF you are provided an answer and depending on WHO answers – assume it is wrong, do some research, and write an article letting the public know about it.

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RENEWED PARENT FRUSTRATION AND MORE POOR DECISION-MAKING FROM DISTRICT ADMINISTRATORS

VARLEY, KOT AND THE ONGOING OBSESSION WITH SAI AKIRI

THIS YEARS BUDGET PROCESS WAS NOT NORMAL

THE BERKELEY HEIGHTS PUBLIC SCHOOL 2022 BUDGET CONTROVERSY: SYNOPSIS

DR. MELISSA VARLEY’S CONTRACT RENEWAL: ALL THE ARTICLES