News item: In front of a noticeably bigger crowd than usual, the West Windsor-Plainsboro Board of Education, on April 30, publicly interviewed the four West Windsor candidates vying for the seat of Robert Johnson, whose resignation went into effect May 1.
News item: With an audience of two, the Montgomery school board publicly interviewed the candidates to find the best replacement for Dr. Christine Abrahams, who resigned due to time constraints.
News item: The Princeton Board of Education will not allow the public to be present when school officials later this month interview candidates to fill a vacancy on the school board.
Not to be overly repetitive, but the best government is an open government and there appear to be too many public officials in Princeton who don’t agree with that statement, preferring instead to conduct the public’s business behind closed doors.
Last week, we wrote to encourage this very same school board to conduct the search for the next superintendent in public as much as possible.
This decision to interview candidates for public office in a secret session does not bode well.
It does not make sense. And it is just plain wrong.
Why interview the people wishing to fill a vacancy left by a publicly elected official in secret?
If these people, whoever they are (we don’t know yet because the board won’t release their names), were to seek the seat through a regular election process, not only would we know their names, qualifications and philosophies, they would be doing everything possible to get those messages across to the public.
School Board President Timothy Quinn said it was a “board decision” to interview candidates in closed session, treating it as a personnel matter.
Baloney. It is not a personnel matter. It is a public matter.
We hope the parents who care about such matters will raise a stink. They deserve to know who is in the running for the seat, even if they can’t vote on the person at this time.
It’s important for them to know because whoever the school board ultimately chooses will have a leg up in the November election if he or she chooses to run — for real and in public — at that time.
We encourage the school board to reconsider this unwise decision.
