Whether you’re a current school parent, a former one, or never had kids in the district at all, you still have a stake in how it’s run.

Eliza Schleifstein is a longtime resident and taxpayer of Randolph, NJ. She is the mother of two daughters who both attended Randolph Township Schools from kindergarten through graduation. She writes and comments on local education, with a focus on school district transparency and spending.

My youngest graduated two years ago. My oldest, six. Yet my husband and I, along with a small group of fellow empty nesters, still show up at every board of education meeting, just as we did when our children were students. We still write emails. We still ask questions. We still challenge decisions.

Why? Don’t we have better things to do?

Graduating your children from the school system does not graduate you from its consequences. If anything, once your children are gone, you may have an even clearer obligation to pay attention. And the same logic holds if your kids are enrolled right now, or even if you’ve never had a child in one of your district’s schools at all – none of us gets a pass. Current parents are watching decisions that shape their kids’ classrooms this year. All of the community’s residents – even those who’ve never had a child enrolled – are still funding the district (through their property taxes), living next to it, and counting on it to keep their town worth living in.

Boards of education don’t just set school policies. They control enormous – often nine-figure or larger – budgets. They levy property taxes. They approve contracts with dozens of different counterparties. They issue debt. They hire the superintendent. School governance isn’t only about budgets and curriculum — it’s about civic trust: the public’s confidence that the district is acting responsibly, transparently, and in the entire community’s interest, not just the interest of those with children currently enrolled, and especially not just the interest of the board members themselves or the school district’s administration.

And New Jersey has shown, repeatedly, what happens when taxpayers stop watching – which is exactly why none of us should, whether we’re a current parent, a past parent, or never had a child in the district at all.

Start with the money.

In my town, Randolph, roughly 71 cents of every property tax dollar goes to the school district, not the town, which is really just the tax collector here. The town and the district each stay in their own lanes, except that the town collects all the money and hands the district its share. Call it separation of powers: school leadership and town leadership operate almost entirely independently of one another, even though one of them is spending most of your tax bill.

History tells us what happens when oversight disappears.

In Newark, decades of dysfunction led to more than 20 years of state control over its schools. In Paterson, repeated governance failures again triggered state intervention. In Toms River, residents fought over deficits, school closures, and structural budget instability. In Montclair, millions of dollars in unpaid bills led to two referenda and a steep tax bill for residents.

But I don’t have to look to Newark or Paterson to understand why oversight matters. I can look right here in my own town.

Randolph is a district that turned how Columbus Day was listed on the school calendar into a needless public debacle — a controversy that didn’t end until a five-hour special board meeting, with more television cameras than you’d find in the White House press room, had concluded with the board begrudgingly reverting to exactly the way things had always been in the interests of finally stemming the resulting chaos.

A district where a former superintendent became the subject of national humiliation after being caught in the Ashley Madison scandal and then accused of having intentionally set his own home on fire, a bizarre episode that underscored how poor judgment at the top can damage public trust.

A district where the board renewed the current superintendent’s contract years before it was required , not once but twice, awarding her compensation and benefits that many residents viewed as excessive – even after a vote of non-confidence by the teachers just one year into her first contract and then later after she was caught on a hot microphone dismissing concerned parents as “crazies” during an uproar over a new state-mandated health curriculum.

A district that asked taxpayers to approve a $41 million bond referendum to fix deteriorating classrooms and other parts of school buildings and facilities, while many residents rightly asked why those  renovations weren’t included in the $18 million referendum from just a few years earlier – which financed the construction of a nearly   $12 million field house that many still see as a glorified locker room.

A district that with every budget claims it must raise the tax levy or cut staff and student programs, yet every year manages to end with a multi-million dollar budget surplus and then quietly funnels a multiple of the tax increase into its Capital Reserve Account, proving the point residents make every year at the podium during the annual budget meeting: the district never needed the level of tax increase in the first place.

And a district where the board moved school elections to April, timed to take place  during Spring Break, when voter turnout would be at its lowest, extending most of its own members’ terms without ever putting the issue to the voters. That move cost taxpayers roughly $150,000 in election-related expenses that the usual November elections would otherwise have covered at no cost to the district.  When the public learned of the expense and then pushed back, the Board then moved the election back to November –  and extended its members’ terms again. The net result: seven of nine board members granted themselves a full year of extra time in office, without a single additional vote cast.

Think about that. A public body altered election timing to minimize turnout, extended its own tenure twice, and imposed extra costs on taxpayers with zero public consent. If this had happened at the federal or state level in a partisan election, imagine the lawsuits and social media posts from elected officials and their supporters on both sides of the aisle. Imagine a sitting president or governor announcing, “I’m extending my term by a year – just because I say so.  And I’m using your tax dollars to pay for it.”

But when it happens in school governance, we’re told to look away. The reasoning goes they’re unpaid volunteers, no different from church volunteers who deserve our gratitude, and criticizing them – let alone holding them accountable – is somehow unjust. That logic is exactly backwards. It’s precisely why people should be paying closer attention.

When taxpayers disengage and no one is minding the store, a board of education and superintendent can do as they please – as they do where I live, in Randolph – answering to no one but themselves. Let’s face it: board members answer to nobody but voters, and only when their terms come up. And the superintendent in my town has made it clear who she answers to – her “nine bosses,” as she’s put it, referring to the board and no one else.

Let’s call it what it is.

A school budget is not sacred simply because the word “education” is attached to it. Public dollars are public dollars and spending them requires responsibility and oversight — whether or not you currently have a child sitting in one of those classrooms.

If you handed 70 percent of your income to a private investment manager and never reviewed the performance of your investments, never questioned the expenses incurred by the manager in servicing your account, and never challenged either the manager’s leadership or their decisions, you’d be called reckless. Yet that’s effectively what many taxpayers do with school governance. Silence is permission. Yes, your money disappears into the black hole of property taxes — but it is still your money.

Look at the referendum fights.

How many communities have been told that they must approve bond referenda –  tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, in municipal borrowing –  for projects framed as urgent, often at the supposed risk of their schools falling apart or the district being unable to afford providing their children with a quality education, only to later question the costs, the priorities, or the scope?

That has happened across New Jersey. And every borrowed dollar eventually lands somewhere, and the most common landing spot is your tax bill. Debt doesn’t disappear because it’s labeled “capital improvement.” It just gets deferred to homeowners.

Too often, voters are asked to approve these referenda before anyone has asked the hard questions — because too few people are paying attention in the first place.

Then there’s your home.

People say they’ve moved on from the schools. Really? Try selling a house in a district known for declining test scores, fiscal instability and eroding public confidence. School quality affects housing demand. Housing demand, in turn, affects property values.

This isn’t just an empty-nester argument. Whether you have a child in the district right now, never had one at all, or –  like me –  already raised and graduated yours, boards of education influence the single largest investment most residents will ever make. Ignoring that because your kids graduated, went to private school, or you never had children in the first place is like refusing to monitor your retirement account because you’ve stopped contributing to it. It makes no sense.

And here’s the uncomfortable part.

Unfortunately, when residents do speak up, they’re met not with answers but dismissal. Don’t like the property taxes? You should move. Question the spending? You should move. Raise concerns about curriculum, governance, or transparency? You should move.

Residents who fund the system are told that the answer to questioning it is to leave the community they pay to support. Imagine telling a shareholder unhappy with management to sell their stock and stop asking questions — because that’s exactly what residents are: shareholders in their town’s school system, whether or not they currently have a child enrolled in it. That isn’t an argument. That’s an attempt to shut down dissent.

And frankly, it reveals something deeper: an expectation that taxpayers write the checks, stay quiet, and accept decisions without scrutiny — at least when it comes to schools.

That expectation should be rejected. Paying substantial property taxes doesn’t make residents passive customers. It makes them stakeholders. And stakeholders don’t lose the right to question how public money is spent simply because they aren’t currently using the schools.

In fact, telling people to “move” because they demand accountability is itself an argument for why more people should stay engaged. When institutions respond to criticism by trying to delegitimize the critic rather than answer the criticism, oversight becomes more necessary, not less. Institutions grow comfortable when no one is watching — and by the time people notice, the resulting damage can be extensive, systemic and all too often, too late to fix quietly, inexpensively and quickly. Just ask the Montclair residents saddled earlier this year with a steep tax increase after more than $20 million in school district funds went unaccounted for.

So why do I still care what the board of education does?

Because I still pay property taxes. Because I still own my home. Because I still live in this community. Because I still have a stake in what kind of adults our schools are producing. And because surrendering oversight simply because my children graduated would be absurd and against my own interests.

If you’re a parent with kids in the system right now, you don’t need me to tell you the stakes – you’re living them, in real time, every school year. And if you’ve never had a child enrolled in your local community schools at all, don’t assume that lets you off the hook: you’re still funding it, still living beside it, and still counting on it to keep your town a place people want to move to, not away from.

If anything, empty nesters should be more involved, not less. We’re less vulnerable to pressure (including the fear that a vengeful or embarrassed school administration will seek to punish “activist” parents by somehow retaliating against their children), less driven by personal interest, and more willing to ask the questions others won’t. That isn’t meddling. That’s accountability.

And here’s the truth:

If taxpayers who are free to speak instead choose to stay silent, they aren’t bystanders — they’re enablers. When you stop paying attention to how power operates, you don’t remove yourself from the consequences. You simply hand someone else permission to make the decisions for you.  And, through your tacit approval of whatever the board of education and school district administration do, with no questions asked, you actually become part of the problem.

So, whether or not you have children in your town’s school system, take a moment. Go to your district’s website, find out when the next board of education meeting is taking place and take a look at what’s on the agenda and what they’ll be voting on. Many are livestreamed and recorded and then made available for later viewing for days or weeks after the meeting – you can watch from the comfort of your own home, either as it happens or later, at your convenience.  (However, if you want an opportunity to speak publicly, many districts require you to attend the meeting in person and won’t let you “phone in” your comments.)

These meetings happen once or twice a month, and typically last between one to two hours (although some meetings, such as those where the budget is being presented and discussed, can be longer). Weigh that against how deep the district reaches into your pocket, or whether anyone will want to move to a town whose schools “just aren’t what they used to be” – which, these days, describes almost every town in New Jersey –  and those few hours start to look like one of the best investments you’ll make all year.