Families who send their children to Ocean City Public Schools must sometimes feel like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, who says, when she lands in Munchkinland, “people come and go so quickly here!”

That seems to be the drill for the revolving door of superintendents. The school board, which is responsible for fewer than 2,000 students, is getting ready to hire its fifth new superintendent since 2021.

What is responsible for this chaos?

It’s the school board, according to Robin Shaffer, a former board member, although it’s not the members’ fault. While the district is tiny—the size of some high schools–it has twelve school board members, nine representing Ocean City and three representing Upper Township, a sending district. There are also two additional non-voting members from sending districts that don’t send enough students to merit a voting seat: Sea Isle City and Long Port.

In this way, Ocean City Public Schools is a caricature of New Jersey’s overabundance of school districts, school boards, and superintendents, what the late Assemblyman Alan Karcher caller our ” multiple municipal madness.”

Shaffer, a former board members (and former denizen of Maryland which has county districts, a model that New Jersey might emulate), says the size of the school board, which is written into by-laws that no one will touch, is “dysfunctional by design.”

“Finding any kind of consensus is difficult with twelve to fourteen people in the room,” he explains. “The dynamics tend to coalesce around group-think, with the strongest personality in the room holding all the power.”

Ocean City was once far more functional. From 2006-2021, Kathleen Taylor served as superintendent. When she retired, dysfunction set in, at least in terms of choosing the next district leader. First the board hired Interim Superintendent Tom Baruffi, who served until June 2022, when the board settled on Matthew Friedman; he signed a three-year contract that started at $190K per year but quit eight months later to take the top job in Quakertown Community School District in Bucks County. (According to reports, the Ocean City Board of Education found out the news from an article in the Bucks County Herald.) Then in August 2023 the board hired Scott McCartney as an interim; he left in December and the new interim is Terrence Crowley.

The board is currently in the midst of a search as students and teachers endure their fifth superintendent in three years. Now they need someone who will look at Ocean City and say, “there’s no place like home.”