In December 2021 a West Amwell resident made an Open Public Records Act request to the school district, asking for any emails or documents that mention the referendum, facilities or Class III officers, including emails to/from the 9 Board of Ed members and the Superintendent. The response to that request included over 3,300 emails and dozens of documents. These series of articles documents what we found.
There is a bright line rule in school referendums: You cannot ask voters to vote “yes” in them. This goes all the way back to a NJ Supreme Court case, where the court found that a Board of Education improperly asked voters to “Vote Yes” in a newsletter sent to district residents. Every education lawyer has this drilled into their brains. “Whatever you do, never ever ask anyone to vote yes!”.
Naturally this meant the BOE and Superintendent were eager to pursue “Vote Yes!” lawn signs.
The seeds of this seemed to have been planted early in August at the August 11th, 2021 Key Communicators meeting. See below for the meeting minutes:
Note that the Superintendent memorializes “Start a campaign using lawn signs (River Signs) to promote voting yes for the referendum”. This was sent to the entire BOE, who approved of this idea enthusiastically.
This was mentioned later in the Agenda for the August Board Retreat, the relevant slide is shown below with the lawn sign part circled.
It was mentioned again in the minutes are shown below with the Lawn Sign bit circled in red.
By August 19th, it was officially on the Superintendent’s list, and a Key Communicator emailed him the finished image. He shared the image with the entire BOE in his August 19, 2021 weekly update shown below:
The signs are mentioned at several other Committee meetings. The Superintendent approved the use of Eagle colors for the sign and also use of the new SHRSD crest.
To hide the fact that the district was organizing the creation of the lawn signs, the Superintendent tried to get LAEF, PTO, and PTA to fund it. They all turned him down as those organizations were setup to be neutral in election matters. Here is one example thread.
By October as referendum madness was setting in, and the BOE was frustrated that no one would fund the signs, they decided to fund them her selves. One Lambertville BOE member writes to the Superintendent (using her district email):
Now this BOE member can buy signs with her own money and give them out to people, so long as she is doing it all on her own time and not using any district resources. That is a First Amendment right. But not only does she talk about this with the Superintendent, she says she is going to give them to him to “distribute at your next events”. Remember, the Superintendent works for the BOE. So effectively the one of the Superintendent’s bosses told him to distribute signs illegally. The Superintendent, acting in his official capacity at an official district event, has no legal rights to distribute “Vote Yes” lawn signs.
In the end the Board attorney is consulted, and she indicates that the signs could indeed be problematic. In a bit of a panic, one of the BOE members creates a new sign labeled “Paid for by a private citizen”, see the email below.
Sadly for this BOE member, if a sign is created by a BOE member, they are required by law to say so, and have a disclaimer saying this is not authorized by the BOE. But in fact these new signs were authorized by the BOE and Superintendent. A few made it into the community but not many.
