School Board Meeting Cancelled Tonight

Due to the impending snowfall that is expected to hit Central Jersey beginning this evening, the re-organization meeting  of the Bridgewater-Raritan Board of Education has been cancelled and rescheduled for Tuesday, January 7.

If you would like to see the agenda, you can view it from this link.  As of this writing it still bore today's date -- just ignore that.  Although the agenda is 37 pages long, the first few pages deal with the very early part of the session.  The rest is necessary boilerplate.

The initial pages are worth your reading time, especially if you'd like to get an idea of how the process works.  Remember, education is the spot where most of your real estate tax dollars get spent.

Specifically, the beginning of the meeting deals with swearing in the three board members who were elected in November:  Jeffrey Brookner, Jill Gladstone, and Lynne Hurley ran unopposed.  It's also the time when the new board elects its president and vice-president.


The president has the responsibility and privilege of deciding which board members sit on which committee, and which person is named as chairman of each.  (Often, board members will submit their preferences in advance.)

Usually, all this stuff goes smoothly and without much debate. There is no requirement  that officers (president and vice-president) cannot be re-appointed each year, but some boards like to rotate officers.

By the time that a board of education gathers publicly at its re-organization meeting, there already may have been backdoor discussions about the president and VP positions and, in some cases, offline lobbying for them.  When the meeting is convened, the choices may have already been determined.

That is why, when the time comes for the board secretary to call for nominations, the process can move very quickly, without fanfare or any substantive discussion.

However, one can't always count on that.  Challenges to the first nominees presented for each of the two officer positions can and do take place.  Nevertheless, boards of education don't normally like to hang that laundry out in public.