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.

The school buses are back on the road, candidate lawn signs are popping up all over the place, and Facebook is littered with smiling photos of school board candidates promising “compassion,” “leadership,” “transparency,” “fiscal responsibility,” and “putting kids first.” 

Every candidate says this. Every candidate’s campaign materials basically look the same. And absolutely none of it tells you what you actually need to know before you vote in November.

School board elections don’t get the scrutiny that federal and state legislative races do, but the stakes are arguably more immediate: these are the people who approve your property tax levy, sign off on your child’s curriculum, and hire the superintendent who runs your district. 

Yet most voters walk into the booth knowing a candidate’s slogan and nothing about their record, and then either mindlessly vote 1-2-3, treat the school board portion of the ballot as a fifth-grade popularity contest, or ignore that portion completely.

That’s backwards. Campaign statements and materials tell you what a candidate wants you to know. Their record tells you what they’ll actually do. Trust me, I have run for our Board, and I have written those very statements.

Here’s a due-diligence checklist worth working through before you vote – most of it takes nothing more than watching a few board meeting videos and reading a few agendas, all of which are public. 

The right questions depend a little on who you’re vetting. An incumbent already has a record, which has its own paper trail. A first-time candidate doesn’t – so you have to look at how they answer, not just what they’ve voted on.

If They’re an Incumbent: Check the Record

How did they vote on the budget?  

Every board member votes on the annual budget, and those votes are part of the public record. Did they approve it, and if so, did they ask any questions about what was in it? This isn’t an abstract question in a town like Randolph, my town, where more than 70 cents of every property tax dollar residents pay goes to fund the school district – the board’s budget vote is, in a very real sense, the single biggest financial decision made on your behalf all year. 

When a budget goes down, it’s the board’s contingency plan – and the board members who approved the original number in the first place – that determines what gets cut next. That’s exactly why a “yes” vote deserves scrutiny before you cast your own.

Did they ask questions, or just vote with the majority?

Watch a few meetings. Some board members show up prepared, ask intelligent questions about items on the agenda, push back on the administration when something is unclear (which is usually deliberate) or simply doesn’t add up, and make staff explain their reasoning. Others sit at the meeting looking they can’t wait until it’s over and they can go home and eat dinner, say almost nothing, and vote however the rest of the board votes – which is usually an unthinking “yes” on every single motion. Unanimous votes aren’t automatically a red flag (and sometimes they actually show a great deal of collaboration and behind-the-scenes discussion and negotiation over difficult issues), but a member who never once asks a clarifying question in multiple years on the board and acts as a rubber stamp for the administration probably isn’t doing the job.

How do they handle disagreement?

A functional board needs members who can disagree with the superintendent, the board president, or each other without either caving to keep the peace or turning every dispute into a public spectacle or a political soapbox. Look at how a candidate has handled conflict in the past, on this board or elsewhere. 

Do they engage the substance, or do they make it personal? 

In Randolph, records obtained via OPRA surfaced in connection with a School Ethics Commission complaint, Ron Conti v. Sheldon Epstein, that was fully dismissed in February 2026 and include a November 2024 email in which then-Board Vice President Amanda Adams told fellow board members her plan for responding to a fellow Board member, whom she thought had been asking too many questions: “I’m thinking that we ignore him as much as we can and offer him minimal responses to his questions in public… My plan is to suffocate him with my silence.” 

The underlying ethics complaint didn’t go anywhere, but the email is a real, documented answer to how a sitting board officer chose to handle a colleague who asked challenging questions.  This is exactly the kind of record a campaign mailer will never show you.

What a Board member says when they think you aren’t paying attention is even more important than what they say when they know you are.

Have they read the contracts and policies before voting on them?

Boards approve contracts for everything from busing to legal services to shared-services agreements with neighboring districts. The NJ School Ethics Commission has reviewed cases where a business administrator’s shared-services compensation quietly climbed by $40,000 per year, year after year, with no real explanation on the record. That’s the kind of thing that happens when contracts get buried on a 30-item consent agenda and nobody on the board asks a question before voting yes on every item included in the motion.  Likewise, at every Board meeting, policies come up for approval that implicate critical issues in the schools, such as attendance, the use of electronic devices on school property, the procedure for challenging teacher and administrative disciplinary and other decisions, and even how members of the community may raise their concerns with the district and participate in public meetings.  Does the board member running for re-election seem to have familiarity with the contents of these contracts and policies and ask practical questions about them, or is everything just an automatic “yes” vote?

What is their attendance record at meetings?  Board committees, such as finance, facilities and transportation, education/curriculum, and personnel, do the behind-the-scenes detail work that full board meetings don’t have time for. Attendance and participation records are usually available through the board secretary or district website. 

A member who skips multiple full, public meetings or committee meetings with zero explanation is a red flag.  Do they have legitimate reasons for missing a meeting, or would they rather simply be doing something else with their time when the meetings take place?  Do they occasionally have to miss a meeting because of work commitments or parenting responsibilities, or have they missed a chunk of them – especially in consecutive months?  We elect these members to represent us and if they aren’t there, they aren’t representing us.  Would you tolerate that from a member of Congress? No.

What is their actual voting record – in full? 

This is the one that matters most, and it’s the one voters check least. Board meeting minutes and audio or video recordings of public board meetings are public. Pull them. An incumbent’s votes are a matter of record, not a matter of memory or spin.

If They’re New to the Ballot: Test the Substance

Does the candidate actually understand school finance?

A first-time candidate hasn’t voted on a budget yet, so ask them to explain one instead.  Can they describe how state aid works, what drives the tax levy, what “banked cap” means, or why an enrollment shift in a town like Montclair or Mahwah changes staffing needs district-wide?  Have they previously worked with budgets (even if on a smaller scale) as part of their day jobs or through past volunteer work on the board of a religious. community or other non-profit organization, or as a member of a homeowners’ association or condominium board?  A candidate who can’t explain the basics of the job and who has no past experience with budgeting isn’t ready to sign off on spending a $100 million budget on day one.

Do they understand the line between governance and administration?

This is the single most common failure mode for new board members across the entire state. The board sets policy and hires and evaluates the superintendent. It does not run the schools on a day-to-day basis, nor does it make hiring, firing and promotional decisions on teachers, principals and athletic coaches. Candidates who talk about wanting to personally oversee curriculum decisions, discipline individual staff, or manage building-level operations are describing a job that isn’t theirs.

Do they understand the School Ethics Act, OPRA, and public-records and disclosure obligations? 

Board members are subject to the Open Public Records Act, the School Ethics Act, and the open meeting requirements of the Open Public Meetings Act – and these aren’t abstractions. New Jersey’s Appellate Division has ruled that a board member’s texts and emails on their own personal phone can still be a public record, subject to OPRA and thus disclosure to any member of the public who asks, if they relate to board business.  And Board members can’t separately meet in private or exchange group emails or texts if a quorum of them (e.g., five out of the nine members) are involved.

Randolph, like every district, maintains a designated custodian of records and a public OPRA request process – but how quickly and fully a board actually responds often has less to do with the law and more to do with whether the requester is seen as friendly to the board, neutral or a nuisance. A candidate should already understand, at a minimum, what can and can’t be discussed in closed session, what constitutes a conflict of interest, and why a records request isn’t a nuisance to be denied because it’s “none of the public’s business” or stonewalled.

Likewise, once elected to the Board, a member subjects themselves to certain ethical obligations and restrictions on what would otherwise be totally free speech.  Someone running for the Board needs to know that they can’t use that position to help themselves financially, nor to hand out favors with the schools to their family and friends, and that they can’t offer their own views as those of the entire Board or speak for the Board without specific permission to do so.  There are many other ethical restrictions, and board candidates need to be familiar with them.

What would they actually do differently – specifically?

“I’ll bring more transparency” or “I’ll work to better balance the interests of the students, the taxpayers and the administration” is not an answer. It’s an empty, vague platitude.  Ask what specific policy they’d change, what specific practice they’d end or adopt, and what specific decision by the current board they disagree with and why. Vague dissatisfaction is easy to campaign on and impossible to hold anyone accountable for once they’re in office.

How have they handled conflict before?

A new candidate won’t have board votes to judge, but they’ll have a record somewhere – a PTA/PTO, a homeowners’ association, a town committee, a workplace. Ask around or just watch how they talk about people who disagree with them on the campaign trail. 

Why are they running?

Perhaps most importantly, listen to the reasons they give for why they’re running.  If their campaign materials are heavily political and sound more like they came out of someone’s run for Congress, that’s a red flag.  School board members have almost no ability to “make policy” on any of these items and the candidate simply may not be able to work with others on the Board whom they perceive as having different political views and values.  Likewise, an expressed interest in “taking the next step up” from serving on one of the PTA/PTOs for their children’s schools tells you nothing about whether the candidate will be an effective board member.  

A school board is not a district-wide PTA/PTO, or a PTA/PTO “on steroids,” and an expressed desire to “help the superintendent in any way I can” is more of a warning sign than anything else.  In short, does this person want to serve the community and make the school district better for all stakeholders?  Or are they doing this to serve a personal agenda, to advance the goals of some special interest group, to promote a fledgling political career, or because they like power or “being in charge?”

A school board candidate’s campaign mailer tells you what they want you to know. Their record tells you much more.