Always a favorite among our readers, NutleyWatch contributor “Espalier” has submitted another well-timed commentary on the many issues we face with the Belleville school district, and the importance of Tuesday’s election.
Makers and Breakers: The Profit in Destruction
“It is a singular honor for me, actually, to be asked to participate in this important exercise in local self-determination.”
-Bob Braun, BUC Candidates Forum, Belleville, NJ, 10/27/14
This election, November 4, 2014, is a bellwether moment for our township.
We are presently enduring a Board of Education which has been willing to take a sixty-two million dollar budget to a “secure location,” where neither the public, nor even the Belleville Town Council itself, was allowed access to what is, rightfully, public information. While there, the BOE converted the budget process into a feeding frenzy for political allies, friends and family, and, most sadly of all, managed to dissipate a lot of hard earned capital and human resources on piles of bling, distributed among a core group of operators. Bewilderingly, this group sought to live large on school board funds while students, teachers, and parents were left to wonder—when they weren’t being punished, in a variety of ways, for noticing the flaws in the BOE plan—why? This painful spectacle requires us to issue a sharp correction to the “drift” of the parties involved. It is difficult, at present, to term them “responsible.”
A steady stream of serious complaints from people within local government, from alert citizens, from students, teachers, and administrators within the schools community, as well as the advent of some much improved public reporting, have all served to initiate the process of correction. But the recalcitrant Belleville BOE was thwarted, most significantly, by the compulsory presence of a NJ State Monitor, now on indefinite assignment to the district and charged, by acting NJDOE Commissioner David Hespe, with overseeing spending and hiring decisions within the Belleville BOE. The BOE, itself, would have preferred to ignore the whole thing, continue unabated, and pass the burgeoning costs on to local taxpayers, had they been allowed.
I have not seen a single voluntary statement of accountability from a member of this school board with regard to their role, let alone their culpability, in this party gone way out of bounds. And to make matters worse, they continue to drag their heels and leave the tough decisions to others.
How can that possibly be? Did I miss it? Or is it all still privileged information, due, by now, to the escalating presence and involvement of various attorneys and official investigators?
We now have a critical opportunity to place two new school board trustees among the membership of this darkened decision-making body, alongside the NJ State Monitor, Mr. Thomas Egan. We have a hard fought opportunity to exercise our responsibility as voters, and to take another step toward restoring proper local management and oversight to the Belleville School System. The sooner we turn things around for the Board of Education, and the more completely we accomplish the task, the better the prospects for the full recovery of our children’s educational resources. It is our responsibility to help our youngest citizens flourish. No township can afford to abuse and forsake its educational system, not least of all the teachers and the students themselves, and expect the community as a whole to prosper.
In the meantime, education itself, and public education in particular, once regarded as a right, is being ever more rapidly commoditized. And with these developments come powerful new players, with updated forms of old political games.
As a key community in Essex County, Belleville will, one might hope, continue to be a secure environment for families of modest means. This must, for the future of the township and all who pass through here, include a rich, challenging, and supportive educational process for its youngest and most vulnerable members.
Our senior citizens, at the other end of the age spectrum, are another vulnerable population. Neither they, nor the population of working people, who comprise the central demographic in town, can afford to blithely write another check for such fiscal impropriety. Never mind that we will also be asked to fund, on credit, a wanton—and partly successful—snatch and grab of taxpayer resources.
Some within the wealthier communities of Essex County have long sought to distance themselves from the upheaval and misfortune that has tormented Newark, our neighbor to the south, for half a century. A variety of callous ideas have been floated around during this period. They range from “let it burn,” to “let’s get some heavy hitters in there to clean out corruption and restore order and pave the way for redevelopment.”
People, real people, meanwhile, have sought to live their lives through all of it—the noise as well as the silence.
Many an Essex County resident, some from way out west in Per Capita Paradise, has expressed resentment over their feeling of having to “pick up the tab” for the cost of running Newark; the city, the courts, and the Newark Public School System. Some of these same people, one can reasonably surmise, are among those who have sought to take control of Belleville. Time and again, over decades, they have been frustrated at our local polling places.
Last May, outside backers felt they had a prime opportunity, the best in years, for wresting complete majority control of both the Township and School Board Budgets—$111 million dollars combined, give or take a few lawsuits and “unforeseen” emergency loans—and again they were rebuffed. Their plan, however, driven by the momentum of its vulgar legacy, lives on, albeit dampened by the pushback, not to mention the wear and tear.
This is not simply another school board election. There are major financial concerns, of the high end investor sort, swimming in county political waters at present. Among them are several with a specific preference for communities that have been financially weakened.
We cannot allow our school budget process, and with it, the overall health of our school system, to suffer long in such a hotly contested environment. For the Belleville BOE to compromise our schools, at a moment like this, is tantamount to hot-rodding drunk on a mountain pass with no guardrails.
Metaphorically speaking, when the local tow truck operator also owns the nearest pub, where happy hour begins at 1 pm, and therein resides a complete list of phone numbers on the restroom stall for people willing to help you score, then you should know better than to stop in for a quick one before that particular leg of your journey.
I am still waiting for an evident awareness, from someone on the Belleville School Board, of what is at stake here. How can this be? Are they clueless or are they suspiciously coy?
We need school board members who will afford us additional light on this school board and its doings. The new trustees need a clear sense of current exposure to risk—from within the township and beyond—they need familiarity with the processes involved, and, above all, they need to be responsive to the public and free of intimidation. They will also need something that used to be called honesty.
The current board has too much to hide. They are all implicated, or at the very least, intimidated, and they appear to act without remorse when they are not left looking lost and helpless. In the absence of a statement from the current trustees as to why they allowed this situation to develop, one is left to assume the worst.
We are also left with a mounting pile of evidence related to the mismanagement and opportunistic abuse of this vital community asset at the hands of political operatives, many of them with interests and connections which stretch far beyond Belleville, New Jersey.
I don’t yet see the would be self-described “victims” of this enhanced public inquiry, the BOE itself (including the recently departed), making a substantial effort toward a proper public presentation of their organizational meetings. Nor do I see them offer sufficient explanation of their political intentions, their obvious mistakes, nor least of all, the will and intentions of their even more silent backers.
Notices of fundraisers—and photo ops with connected politicians, like teflon coated confetti–that’s what I see. And an endless stream of unconscionable BS and stonewalling, with some big dollar signs continuing to hemorrhage into the arena of some very shady doings, lawsuits among them. Mind-bending lawsuits. Lawsuits which stem from ridiculously low caliber hires in the form of, among other appointments, a little old position called Superintendent of Schools.
What sort of chaff is this?
On a much lighter note, I have seen statements regarding these issues from Mayor Kimble and the Town Council majority, and thank goodness for that!
This thing stinks. And it is a serious concern.
Vote, November 4, for two new school board officials. The people of the Township of Belleville—for the benefit of all of its residents—require proper representation on their local Board of Education. Without representation we are administratively blind in the face of demands which have no parallel in our history.
We must protect our financial foundation through times good and bad. Without it, the township stands to lose propulsion. Should that happen, there will be a variety of suitors, to be sure, waiting to bail us out. Some of them are liable to be less than truthful in their advertising.
Decay is a natural process—even when it is ideologically engineered. Today’s rot is on its way to being tomorrow’s bumper crop. As a township, we need to be on the watch for what springs next from the “mysterious” cow pie which we happened to kick in the year 2014.
Never mind the smell. Please get to the polls.
Espalier
Be the first to comment