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 for the year 2021, 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.
Throughout the entire referendum process we were told that West Amwell School waste toast. It had reached it’s “Functional end of life“. It was “not structurally sound“. It was “really old“. And in one of the videos, the Superintendent states that if the referendum doesn’t pass he’ll have to deduct $2 million/year from the budget to do emergency work to keep the buildings from falling down.
As it turns out, none of that was true.
When November 3rd dawned the day after the election, things had not turned out the way the Board had hoped. Despite their massive PR push in October, the referendum outcome was in serious doubt.
Clearly contemplating defeat, the Superintendent emailed the district’s architectural firm:
Here the Superintendent is contemplating a brand new referendum plan for 2022 that is completely different from the 2021 plan. Suddenly the Superintendent has all these ideas for renovating the West Amwell School that a month earlier he told everyone were impossible.
All the scare tactics used over the year-long campaign were just that: scare tactics. The district lied through its teeth to voters to try to get its way. The threat to cut programs was a sham. Once their conceited 2021 referendum plan looked to be in jeopardy, new options suddenly were possible.
It is ironic that the Superintendent says “Not the best educational plan but what the community wants“. He privately said the same thing about the 2021 plan, too. It’s pretty clear our Schools Superintendent has little to no interest in the “best educational” anything.
There is also the weird new “Option 2” that he throws out. A PreK-8 school at the south site, used only by West Amwell for PreK-4, and then district-wide from grades 5-8. It is not clear how a new PreK-8 school would suddenly be affordable, even if it is West Amwell only for PreK-4. We were told before that any kind of PreK-8 school would cost far too much.
