Bernards Township School Board Approval Process Questioned: Letter

BASKING RIDGE, NJ — Bernards Township resident Cody Smith shared this letter to the editor:

At the August 22, 2022 meeting of the Bernards Township Board of Education, the board approved by unanimous vote hiring Erica Blackman as a substitute teacher in the Bernards Township School District for the 2022-23 school year.

Ms. Blackman is a member of Bernards: Education For All, a group of board candidates that filed for the November election as a Joint Candidates Committee with the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission on July 23, 2022. The group includes Janice Corrado, and current board members Suzanne Schafer and Guddiah Singh. The group structure explicitly links the board candidates and calls into question their independence and objectivity with respect to one another.

What makes hiring Ms. Blackman problematic is that Ms. Schafer and Ms. Singh voted to approve hiring her after the group had declared its members’ candidacy for the board.

New Jersey statues address conflicts of interest through using positions on a school board to convey benefits to others. Ms. Schafer and Ms. Singh clearly conveyed a financial benefit to Ms. Blackman when they voted in favor of the district hiring her as a substitute teacher.

Regardless whether there’s a legal conflict of interest, there is a conflict of interest in appearance. Appearance is further tainted by the board’s process.

The listing for item 46 in the Personnel Committee Report section of published agenda for the August 22 meeting, “Approve District Substitute Teachers/Nurses 2022-23 School Year,” was the only information given to the public before the meeting and did not include Ms. Blackman’s name.

Further, during the meeting when the board addressed the Personnel Committee Report, Ms. Blackman’s name was never mentioned. It was only subsequent to the August meeting after the board approved Ms. Blackman’s hiring could the public become aware Ms. Blackman was indeed hired. To learn this, one must go online to review the August meeting’s detailed minutes which were just recently posted after they were approved for release at the September 19 board meeting.

While the approval and documentation process are perhaps legal, it clearly obfuscates Ms. Blackman’s hiring and makes it unlikely the public would ever become aware of the board’s action without a careful review of the August meeting’s detailed minutes.

For these reasons, I recently asked the board to rescind its August vote to hire Ms. Blackman and give Ms. Schafer and Ms. Singh the opportunity to reconsider, for legal and/or other considerations, whether they should participate in voting to hire Ms. Blackman.

As the record stands today, it seriously calls into question the board’s process, objectivity and independence. A new vote, after the conflict is explained to the public, allows for the transparency the board claims is its practice.

Cody Smith