The Star-Ledger Editorial Board first published this here.

For school officials in Newark, it’s going to be a fun October! They’re off on big trips to conferences in Dallas, Atlantic City, and Las Vegas.

At least 18 school board members and district staffers are headed to sunny Dallas, 14 are going to Atlantic City and 10 will be traveling to a conference at the Bellagio in Vegas, including the superintendent, according to expense reports approved by the school board. It’s costing a total of nearly $70,000 so far, and that’s just this month. Who knows what adventures the rest of the year will bring?

This travel around the country has become a habit, one we’ve written about multiple times before. Last October, for instance, at least 19 school officials in Newark including the superintendent attended a conference at a luxury waterfront hotel in San Diego with a poolside bar that served $20 cocktails, tuna niçoise and Wagyu beef.

The year before that, the district sent staffers and board members to countless sunny places like Palm Springs, Orlando, Puerto Rico, Last Vegas, New Orleans and Hawaii for conferences – including at least ten people to both San Diego and Miami. It’s an annual tradition, apparently.

And once again, Newark’s superintendent, Roger León, and the president of the school board, Hasani Council, are refusing to explain why the district needs to send so many people on these trips, or how exactly this helps the academic performance of kids in Newark, most of whom are struggling.

Only 29% are proficient in reading and just 15% are doing math at grade level, according to the state tests last Spring, which is truly alarming – and represents only a 2% improvement in reading and math skills over the previous year.

School officials should be in crisis mode and focused on fighting learning loss, not planning costly excursions. For roughly the same price as this $70,000 spent on travel, you could provide dozens of kids with high dosage tutoring sessions three times a week for several months, for instance.

State regulation says travel to conferences should be “limited to the fewest number” of board members and employees, but the district tells us all the upcoming travel was approved by the Essex County superintendent, Joseph Zarra, who did not respond to our call to discuss it.

Newark’s school board approved these upcoming Dallas and Vegas trips in August, shortly before the school year began in chaos for families of kids with disabilities. Some missed the first week of classes entirely because district schools had no available seats for them, their parents told Chalkbeat – something a spokesperson told us Superintendent León cannot discuss, for student confidentiality reasons. Right.

He and the president of the school board, Council, are slated to go to Dallas, Atlantic City and Vegas and will be out of the district for half of October. In statements, they told us they don’t choose the locations of conferences, which provide “valuable insights,” León said, an opportunity for networking and “sharing best practices of our district,” as if other schools are eager to learn the secrets of Newark’s failing performance.

Council, the board president, is legally barred from complaining about León, even if he wanted to, since his father is an employee of the district. That’sa clear conflict of interest with his role overseeing the superintendent. What a perfect mess.

León previously told us that Newark is a “truly high performing district” that other districts are learning from: “By any objective measure, the progress that Newark’s schools are making is undeniably incredible.” Given the scores and failure to make significant improvements, that’s delusional.

For a moment, give him the benefit and assume there may be some value in these conferences – like the one in Dallas held by an advocacy group for urban schools, the Council of the Great City Schools, of which León and Council serve in leadership positions. Even then,why send 18 people? The average superintendent goes to only two to four conferences a year, and board members go to maybe one or two, according to Betsy Ginsburg, head of the Garden State Coalition of Schools, which represents about 100 New Jersey districts of varying sizes. Newark makes a habit of it, with a crowd.

The few who go report back to the others, Ginsburg says. That’s just common sense, and what many districts will do for the school boards convention this month in Atlantic City – because those who don’t go can just do their trainings online. “Most of them are busy and don’t have that much time for conferences,” she said.

On top of that, other districts are losing state funding and forced to lay off teachers, she notes. “A third of the districts probably could barely afford to send people to Atlantic City, let alone anywhere else,” she said. “Imagine if you were contemplating sending even one board member to an out-of-town conference at the same when you’re laying off teachers. That’s bad educationally, bad optically; that’s just bad.”

Right. And it’s the same when kids are failing in Newark.