The Asbury Park Board of Education meeting last Thursday was “pandemonium,” as one local paper described it, devolving into a shouting match among board members, teachers, and parents. One staff member described the event as a “dumpster fire.” 

Why all the chaos? With enrollment shrinking, student outcomes worsening (currently one percent of fifth graders are proficient in math), and teachers feeling besieged by the administration’s toxic pattern of retaliation, that’s what you get. To wit: last week over 90% of staff members signed paperwork saying that had “no-confidence” in Superintendent Rashawn Adams’ leadership, which officers of the Asbury Park Education Association announced at the meeting. The petition specifically cites a hostile work environment, lack of collaboration, violations of Board of education policies, retaliation of staff for speaking out and reporting violations, and the elimination of critical positions. 

Yet Adams and the Board won’t  see the names of staff members who signed. That’s because staff members don’t trust Adams to not retaliate. Instead, the petition was sent to Monmouth County Executive County Superintendent Dr. Lester Richens.

You can watch the video of the meeting here, although the Asbury Park Reporter warns, “as  teachers and parents were voicing major concerns about the Asbury Park school system, the audio and video feed provided by the board inexplicably ended.”  (The paper substituted its own feed.) This information comes from numerous brave sources.

Here are highlights:

• The meeting was scheduled to begin at 6 pm but not enough board members showed up for a quorum; board president Carritta Cook and vice president Shadeen Alls Bey never showed up at all. Members Anthony Remy and Joe Grillo finally appeared and the meeting began at 6:45.
• Initial board discussion focused on Adams’ plan to create the “Asbury Park Academic Bridge 45 Day Program” for 6th-12th graders who violate discipline policies and “require a change of setting beyond short term periods of exclusion.” This program is operated by Essex Regional Education Services Commissioner, which also runs Sojourner School, serving “pre-adjudicated middle and high school aged youth, who have had encounters with the Juvenile Justice System.”) 

Adams pushed the program as a way to save money on out-of-district tuition for students with severe disciplinary issues (who sometimes are sent to Coastal Learning Academy, an out-of-district placement that takes students who are suspended). Instead, they would be in a classroom within the district, although board member Joe Grillo wondered if these students could be in a different building and Tracy Rogers asked who would administer the program, whether more teachers would be hired, and whether the district would really save money. (Adams said he’d consider Grillo’s request and didn’t answer Rogers’ questions.)

• During the public comment section, teachers and students once again brought up the controversy surrounding Athletic Director Troy Bowers, who has been accused multiple times of bullying students. One teacher said she had filed a Harassment, Intimidation, and Bullying complaint, which requires a formal investigation, but Bowers wasn’t investigated. This is a violation of HIB policy.
• Several teachers discussed the most recent staff evaluations, which they say have been used to retaliate against teachers and contrary to the state law TEACHNJ. A physical education teacher, Kelly Carlson, said she received a low mark after 18 years of positive evaluations. She met with Bowers, her supervisor, who said he’d “fix’ it but didn’t. 
• Then, to everyone’s surprise, board member Anthony Remy (at about 1:45 on the video) got up from his seat, walked over to the podium with the microphone, and dragged it to the  board table in order to behave like a member of the public. He pleaded with the room to keep the focus on the children. This was “embarrassing,”  he said, but he wasn’t a “politically-correct person” and didn’t care about ethics charges. “We are going to lose this place,” he said, perhaps in reference to gentrification. And, repeatedly, “I got facts.”
• Then things got weirder. With the microphone still at the board member table, ex-school board president Angela Ahbez-Anderson, currently a member of Asbury Park City Council, started speaking (From her bio: “Under her leadership Angela has unified a once divided and dysfunctional [school] board.”) She said when she first came on the school board, “our children couldn’t read and write on grade level.” She scolded the teachers, saying, “when a teacher is enthusiastic about teaching, a child is enthusiastic about learning…This man [Adams]  has come here to hold you accountable, and you don’t like it….You should be ashamed of yourselves!…I would come into the building and the kids were throwing balls and the teacher was on her phone and I couldn’t even send my children to this school because they weren’t learning because of the teachers who were here. I know you don’t like what I say but I really don’t care.”

Worth noting: Ahbez-Anderson, a political player in town, attended  former district superintendent Lamont Repollet’s Ghana jaunt, initially paid for by federal grants intended for student enrichment. She also was a beneficiary of Repollet and his successor’s habit of using taxpayer money to pay for deluxe  trips, like this one to Los Angeles at a cost of $11,000. 

At that point the board went into Executive Session.

Stay tuned.