This morning Princeton Superintendent Carol Kelley unexpectedly resigned, effective August 31st, 2024. Until then she will receive her $244,800 salary. Princeton parents received the news in an email from the district school board, which came about 30 minutes after Kelley wrote an email to staff. In her email she called her decision “difficult” but “for personal and professional reasons I must take time to reset and recenter myself.”

This news was first reported by Planet Princeton.

Kelley’s tenure, less than two and a half years, was marked by controversy. In June 2022 she hired a math consultant, Eric Milou, to redesign the math sequences that students take to offer all students the same courses and address the dearth of Black and Hispanic students taking advanced courses. (Milou is a fan of the controversial “California Framework,” which injects social justice into math instruction. Daniel Buck says it is astounding both in its “breadth” and “mediocrity.”) Parents protested, charging, “it is disadvantaged students who stand to lose the most from this ‘leveling down’ approach; families of means can and will seek such instruction elsewhere if it is not provided by the public schools.”

The following year School Board accepted her recommendation to not renew Princeton High School Principal Frank Chmiel’s contract. In response, parents and teachers held a rally and started a petitions to demand Kelley’s resignation. In addition, the teachers union and the school board released statements and Chmiel put out a lengthy statement of his own saying his performance evaluation had been “weaponized.” Two Princeton residents started a gofundme page for Chmiel’s legal expenses.

This past September a new vendor took over the afterschool program and had “major staffing issues.” Parents complained, more so after Kelley said she couldn’t join a stakeholder meeting on Zoom because she was on a ferry to Cape Cod.