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.
One of the biggest surprises out of the OPRA response was the fact that the district lead an illegal electioneering campaign for months leading up to the referendum vote.
We first see a reference to it on August 12th, 2021, in an email from a BOE member to the Superintendent about the Superintendent’s weekly update to the Board:
Here she says “As your Nov candidate I didn’t plan to canvas the neighborhood as WAT is a pretty vast space and I just don’t have the time“. From this we can infer that this update talked about some kind of canvasing of voters in the district.
This is clarified by the Superintendent’s response:
“No need to canvas as we are actually going to have key communicator team members canvas“. Note this canvassing was messaged by the Superintendent in his official capacity to the BOE, and is being discussed using district emails. As such, this is not first-amendment protected action. This is the district conspiring to illegal canvas the electorate to persuade them to vote “yes”. This is classic electioneering, which the BOE is barred from doing by its own policy, along with NJ State law.
To support the canvasing effort, the Superintendent reached out to the County Board of election to get a list of registered voters in the district. He forwards the list to his Key Communicators group as seen below in this email to them on August 28th, 2021:
The spreadsheets list the name, address, party, voting history, etc for every registered voter in West Amwell, Lambertville, and Stockton. This was obtained by the Superintendent in his official capacity, and was passed on to the Key Communicators using his district email address.
By September the Superintendent was well into his PR campaign to get the referendum passed, but he started hitting headwinds. People were not showing up to his meetings, West Amwell residents were angry at the lack of full transparency in his presentations and videos, and Board members became concerned that things were going off the rails. The Key Communicators asked the Board to get the BOE members themselves more directly involved, and those members not only agreed, but used their marketing backgrounds to help re-launch the PR campaign.
Relevant to electioneering, Lambertville Board of Ed members came to the Superintendent’s aid:
Here a Lambertville Board member says “Meagan and I developed and deployed a canvassing operation in less than 24 hours to conduct a door-to-door wellness check earlier this week. We could repurpose the turf Meagan created to pass on to community groups who can carry out a canvas for the referendum. I think this kind of direct-to-voter contact is very important“.
This is really important. A board member is effectively using our tax dollars to talk about illegally canvasing voters and persuade them to vote yes for the referendum.
By mid-September canvassing was being discussed officially in the School and Community meetings. The S&C Chairperson sent out the minutes to the full list of committee members:
Of course the minutes have little fibs built into them. They say “Community members have organized signs and offered to organize canvassing”. As know from the email evidence here, the canvassing was actually organized by Board members and the Superintendent. And as we’ll see in another episode of From the OPRA Vault, the lawn sign ideas originated with the BOE and Superintendent, and the final image was approved by the Superintendent.
Fast forward to late October, and the Board was really concerned about the referendum failing. Another Lambertville BOE member steps up and takes direct charge of the canvassing effort, writing to the Key Communicators with her district email:
Note that three other Board of Ed members are copied on this email, so it is hardly the action of one lone Board member.
We know from anecdotal data that the Board of Ed would not only help lead these canvasing efforts, they went knocking on doors themselves. We have multiple reports of people changing their votes to “Yes” based on this canvassing, which was illegally coordinated and run by the Board of Ed using district resources.
Why is this illegal?
The problem with School Districts advocating for a referendum or any kind of electioneering is that it violates both SHRSD policy as well as State Law. SHRSD Policy #9120 – PUBLIC RELATIONS PROGRAM (M) says, in part, “All activities involving promotional efforts to advance a particular position on school elections or any referenda are prohibited“.
This mirrors N.J. Admin. Code § 6A:23A-5.2, which says the same thing: “All activities involving promotional efforts to advance a particular position on school elections or any referenda shall be prohibited“.
The same section of the N.J. Admin. Code says, “Moreover, any publication(s) distributed by the district board of education via mass mailings or other means to the school district community at large within 60 days before any election in which any district board of education member is seeking any elective office or any election relating to school district operations held in the district shall be submitted to the executive county superintendent for review prior to distribution to ensure public funds are being expended in a reasonable and cost-effective manner.” [emphasis ours]. There is no indication that any of the referendum materials from September or October were ever reviewed by the County Superintendent.
