Lawyers and Loss of Focus: Factors Likely Connected to the BHPSNJ Decline

May 25, 2023

My sixth and final email to the BOE exploring reasons connected to the Decline of Berkeley Heights Schools and How to Reverse It

Last year the BOE Majority and Administration took strange and unprecedented steps in using District funding to ensure that a newly elected BOE Member and an agenda for change would fail.

Before Sai’s term, concerns about the District’s legal representation were widely discussed in the community, due to the violations of law connected to the reconfiguration, violations of OPMA (also connected to the reconfiguration) that led to a de-facto settlement with the Prosecutor and an ethics complaint related to Nepotism that the Superintendent has now admitted to – also connected to reconfiguration.

Parents had no choice but to go to third parties to vette the process as the BOE and Administration were unreachable. Instead of providing the BOE with good counsel, Attorneys threw the term “baseless” at everything until it was rendered meaningless. This term was used to describe Ms. Akiris complaint to the Attorney General in a letter to the editor (that complaint ended up being validated) and then again by the District’s Attorneys in communication to the Judge charged with deciding the Superintendent’s Nepotism case (which again, the Superintendent admitted to).

During 2022, instead of working with Ms. Akiri, the BOE majority decided to hide behind attorneys and policy changes to fight what she and Dr. Foregger were asking the BOE to consider every step of the way.

Also, during this time, meetings were reduced to once a month, last-minute agendas, last-minute agenda changes, and unnecessary policy changes, many of which directly contradicted the platforms elected by the public drove almost every meeting.

The District’s Attorneys would act as elected members and provide incorrect information starting with the budget meeting as BOE Members snickered.

BOE Members expressed feigned shock, and Attorneys intervened in ways that were apparent conflicts of interest when Ms. Akiri and Dr. Foregger questioned legal bills.

The year culminated in two BOE Members from the BOE Majority introducing motions to file ethics charges against Ms. Akiri – many of these charges have been dismissed and the ones that remain are just inaccurate (for example, the District’s attorney removed the term “proper performance” in presenting the violation to the SEC from the following ethics standard):

“I will support and protect school personnel in proper performance of their duties.”

Changing it to mean that the BOE should support ANYTHING the Superintendent does. Do you as a body want the Board to be this powerless over the Administration?

Ironically, the BOE Member whose ethics complaint against Ms. Akiri was funded by the District has more SEC-validated violations moving forward to the Judge than Ms. Akiri, and the only BOE member from the prior year without an ethics complaint against him is Dr. Foregger – who voted against funding Ms. Stanley and Mr. Cianculli’s complaint.

Throughout this, we also had minutes that inaccurately painted the positions of the two new BOE Members sent out to the public at the speed of light at opportune times to undermine their positions before important votes and the election. Why would any BOE member in their right mind who wants to fix this District trust a subcommittee out of the public eye whose minutes may be inaccurately weaponized?

Lastly, the District engaged Attorneys to protect overly redacted responses to OPRA requests and appear to be creating a false backlog early on in an effort to delay and hide even more information from getting to the public. This is the final piece to the puzzle- shutting down Zoom, hiding in committees and misrepresenting the work accomplished, shutting down social media comments, having attorneys bark at parents with improper cautions, and creating policies limiting what BOE members can share with the public on social media and fighting record requests tooth and nail- all while draining the District’s coffers.

Now you might be asking yourself:

“What does any of this have to do with proficiencies?”

And that is precisely the question one should ask.

Nothing.

The answer is nothing.

The BOE Majority and this Administration spent an entire year and an enormous amount of money and effort on anything but proficiencies.

The leadership of this District have handed our schools over to lawyers and BOE members are using tax dollars to protect their seats and find ways to hide from the public. The complete focus of the BOE Majority appears to center on gaming the system to advance a leadership philosophy and set of objectives that seem non-existent to anyone on the outside looking in.

As a result, the audited report shows that our legal cost per pupil is nearly double the other six Districts we have included in our comparisons, while what we spend on textbooks is dead last.

My recommendations include seeking new counsel that views its role as an advisor instead of a political operative, whose loyalties reside with the best interest of the District, not Administrators or a select group of BOE Members they know will continue to hire them.

The District should institute greater oversight of legal spending by voluntarily complying with state requirements prior to hitting a threshold the Business Administrator will never admit we’ve reached and by simply following its existing policy on when it is allowed to use legal services.

The District can also work to reduce vulnerabilities – make documents like correspondence available at meetings versus forcing OPRA requests- and normalize it’s OPRA process which is currently adversarial and clearly intended to deliberately slow down the flow of information to the public.

Many of the changes I recommended in my last email on increasing stakeholder access to information, meetings and influence would also go a long way in normalizing relationships with the community so that members of the public would feel less of a need to seek third party intervention which often incentivizes the District to seek legal counsel.

This is my last email on this subject for the time being. I hope there were moments when you could consider what I’ve written objectively and that what I’ve written has caused you to rethink your current approach to the management of and leadership over this District.

If it has, I would be happy to assist you or the District in walking through some of these changes – especially concerning surveys, data collection, and goal development.

Culture, Data and Measurement: Possible Factors Connected to the BHPSNJ Declines

Possible Factors Connected to the Decline of Berkeley Heights Schools: Family Engagement

Impact of Reconfiguration & School Transitions on Students and the BHPSNJ Decline

Reassignments, Resignations and the Berkeley Heights Public School District’s Decline

Putting It All Together – Rankings, Ratings, Proficiency and Budget

Five More Snapshots of the BHPSNJ Decline

The Story of The BHPSNJ Decline in 5 Photos

What About The Mountainside Kids?