No, that’s not legal

On December 21, the Teaneck Board of Education voted 5-3 to transfer the principal of Teaneck High School, Pedro Valdes, to the role of “district-wide principal on special assignment.” He would retain his salary and would be replaced by Whittier Elementary School principal Piero LoGiudice, the board decided.

Last week, Superior Court Judge Carol Novey Catuogno ruled that the vote was invalid. It gave the board 70 days, until September 26, to hold a vote that complies with New Jersey law, or the action would be void.

Keith Kaplan of Teaneck, who served on the town council from 2016 to 2022, brought the lawsuit against the board of education that led to this decision. Mr. Kaplan is not a lawyer, but he is a law clerk, and he has experience working with legal documents.

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Mr. Kaplan described the December 21 board meeting as “somewhat unorthodox.”

The board holds regular monthly meetings between September and June, according to its website, teaneckschools.org. The meetings for a calendar year are scheduled in January, along with a “reorganization meeting” in January of the next year. The regular December meeting was held on December 13. The December 21 meeting was not one of the regularly scheduled meetings; it was a special meeting, which, under New Jersey law, can be called at any time, with 48 hours notice.

Three new board members had been elected in November to replace three incumbents. They were scheduled to take office on January 1, 2024.

“They said the meeting had to be held right now,” Mr. Kaplan said of the December 21 special meeting. “It couldn’t wait 13 days until the new board members came in” — the next meeting, the 2024 reorganization meeting, was scheduled for January 3 — “because there was an issue with math scores and language arts scores.” More than 80 students “were in danger of failing and not graduating, and therefore the person running the school had to be replaced.”

According to the most recent numbers posted on its website, Teaneck High School had 1,292 students in 2022-23; 324 of them were in 12th grade.

“Roughly the same number of students are in danger of not graduating every year,” Mr. Kaplan continued. “There is an alternate path to graduation for students who don’t pass all courses — they can take a test on general knowledge. The situation was no different this year.

“No one ever explained why the meeting had to be in late December,” he added — but he has an explanation. “The superintendent,” Andre Spencer, “thought there was a more sympathetic board in late December,” he said. “He knew that, and the board members knew that. There’s no question whatsoever.”

When the board announced the December 21 meeting, it did not disclose why it was being called and what would be discussed, Mr. Kaplan continued. “In the actual notice, there was just one word — personnel. That’s all that was put into the newspaper. There was no agenda.” And the meeting was held online.

Under New Jersey law, when a public body, including a school board, discusses public employees, the body is required to let the employees know that they will be a topic of discussion and that a vote may take place that affects their employment. Under most circumstances, it gives those employees the opportunity to decide whether they want it to be a public discussion or a private session.

Keith Kaplan

The board sent the required notice to Mr. Valdes and to Mr. LoGiudice, Mr. Kaplan said. Mr. Valdes requested a public hearing. “Once that happens, everything related to it should have been public. But when it came to the December meeting, they decided that it, as opposed to any other meeting, would be virtual only. There was no option to attend in person. All the meetings prior had been in person.

“And they said that they were going to reduce the amount of time members of the public could speak, from three minutes down to two minutes,” Mr. Kaplan continued. “They claimed that this was to give more people an opportunity to speak; however, they cut off the public comment session after about an hour, which really did not give more people a chance to speak.”

The board said that about 270 people logged onto the meeting, Mr. Kaplan continued. “That’s a significant number for a meeting about which no public information was available,” he said. “The people who spoke were overwhelmingly in favor of keeping Mr. Valdes.

“Mr. Valdes was one of the people who logged in and spoke, and they cut him off at two minutes. They’re talking about his own employment, he asked for a public meeting, and they cut him off.”

Mr. Valdes said the proposed transfer “reeked of retaliation” and has since filed a complaint with the New Jersey Public Employment Relations Commission. That complaint is pending, Mr. Kaplan said. It details a conflict between Mr. Valdes and Dr. Spencer that occurred about a month before the special meeting. Students at the high school had planned a walkout to protest the situation in Gaza. Dr. Spencer felt the students should have the right to miss class with no consequences. Mr. Valdes insisted that the school rules would continue to apply — rules that mandate that missing class results in an unexcused absence, and not handing in an assignment results in a grade of zero on the assignment.

Mr. Valdes told students that they had a First Amendment right to walk out, and to say whatever they wanted off campus, but that when they are on campus, actions that tear the student body apart are not acceptable. “He said saying things like ‘from the river to the sea’ is going to be problematic here because it makes students feel unsafe and makes it hard for us to function as a school and to have an effective learning environment,” Mr. Kaplan said.

“This head-to-head between the principal and the superintendent was the undercurrent of the meeting,” he continued. “Only three of the board members who were staying on voted to approve the superintendent’s plan to get rid of Mr. Valdes.” The board has nine members, and one was not at the meeting.

“This made things highly contentious, highly problematic, and a lot of people showed up and said this is not fair. They started protesting outside the building. They were extremely upset. Mr. Valdes is beloved. He’s been in Teaneck for years, and they did not like how he was treated.” A cross section of the town voiced support for Mr. Valdes, Mr. Kaplan said. “The people who came out were Black, brown, Hispanic, every stripe of Teaneck.”

A lot of upset parents reached out to Mr. Kaplan after the meeting, and he started looking into the legality of the vote. “The fact that the meeting was at the end of the year, 13 days before the next scheduled meeting, the fact that it was only virtual, all of that stuff is what I would call ‘not so kosher but technically legal,’” he said. But he noticed that the way the meeting was publicized did not comply with New Jersey law.

The Open Public Meetings Act, the New Jersey law governing public entity meetings, requires that notice of meetings be given to at least two local newspapers, include an agenda, and let people know if a formal action may be taken at that meeting. If these rules are not followed, any member of the public who feels affected by a decision can sue for a violation of their civil rights.

The December 21 meeting had been publicized in only one newspaper, Mr. Kaplan said, and the notice did not include an agenda.

Suing the board was a last resort for Mr. Kaplan. He reached out to the superintendent, the board’s business administrator, all the board members, and the new members who were about to sit, letting them know that the required notice had not been provided for the meeting. He asked the board to vote on the issue again at a properly publicized meeting. And he made the same request during the public comment time at the January 3 meeting, but he got no response. So he filed suit the next day.

The board did attempt to revote the issue at the January regular meeting, on January 17, but again the notice provided for that meeting did not meet the legal requirement. Although the meeting was publicized in two newspapers, the notice did not include an agenda or inform the public that action might be taken.

Last week, the court found that the board did not provide proper notice for either the December 21 or the January 17 meeting. The judge also noted a pattern over years of the Teaneck board of education not providing the required legal notice for meetings and issued an injunction requiring the board to abide by the law. “The injunction means that I don’t need to file a complaint if they fail to comply,” Mr. Kaplan said. “I just go back to the judge and show the violation.” It’s essentially a “fast track right back into the courtroom” if there are any more violations.

Mr. Kaplan brought this suit because of his sense of fairness. “I do not like or appreciate when good people are harmed by what I would call bad actors,” he said. When he asked friends, acquaintances, and people he met at board meetings, about Mr. Valdes, “everyone said something good,” Mr. Kaplan said. “No one said anything bad. If you ask a cross section about me, half are going to tell you great things, half are going to tell you horrible things. No one said anything bad about this guy. No one. He was beloved across the board.”

Mr. Kaplan met with Mr. Valdes before filing the lawsuit, and Mr. Valdes told him he was very upset about the decision. “He felt that the kids were suffering because of it,” Mr. Kaplan said. “And he said he would appreciate any help he could get.”

Mr. Kaplan noted that he did not bring the suit because the underlying issue was about the situation in Gaza. He would have gotten involved if the underlying principle involved Nazis, he said. And he stressed that he has no personal stake in the outcome and does not have any children who are students in the district now.

He also did not sue because he didn’t agree with the decision. “People I disagree with get to make decisions all the time,” he said. He just found it unfair that the board tried to keep the subject of the meeting “secret, so they did not have to listen to the appropriate constituencies.”

Mr. Kaplan hopes that the board will now follow the required procedures. “Transparency is the set of rules that we agree on,” he said. “If we can’t have a shared basis for how we’re supposed to act, we can’t do anything, and we can’t function. So, at a very minimum, this decision is a notice that we do have a shared way that we function, and moving forward, you need to respect that.”

He’s not sure what the outcome of a new vote will be, but “if 270 people came to the December meeting with no information posted to the public, that means, at least to me, that Mr. Valdes, who was the only person in town who was told about this meeting, could rally several hundred people,” Mr. Kaplan said. “This time around, the vote is going to have to be on an agenda. Just the presence of several hundred people face to face creates an atmosphere that did not exist in a Zoom for people that were about to be off the board.

“Hundreds of people are angry, and they don’t want the board to do this,” Mr. Kaplan concluded. “I don’t get a vote in this. All I get to do is make sure that it is done fairly. The decision is still up to the board, the ones elected by the people.

“Democracy is a bit messy at times, but as long as it’s a democratic process, and things are done according to law, the chips will fall where they may.”