To the Editor:
Five years ago, Bayonne’s Board of Education abolished the position of Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum in the interest of cutting costs and streamlining the bureaucracy. At the time, they said the post was no longer needed.
Two weeks ago, the Bayonne Board of Education voted to re-establish the position of Assistant Superintendent, and then named a politically connected principal and machine politician, Freeholder Ken Kopacz, to fill the post at an exorbitantly high salary.
In these tough economic times, it is outrageous that the Bayonne Board of Education would waste our tax dollars on political patronage, rather than spending money on educating our city’s students.
A year ago, those interested in a better school system rightly proclaimed: “You can’t put students first if you put teachers last.”
Today, the members of the school board are telling us that they intend to put politicians and bureaucrats first and teachers and students last.
That is a disgrace. It is also disgraceful that this appointment was made unanimously, without a dissenting voice, even though two school board trustees contributed a total of about two thousand dollars to Freeholder Kopacz’s political campaigns, as publicly stated on Mr. Kopacz’s own monetary reports filed with the New Jersey Election Commission.
This is a clear conflict of interest on the part of those trustees, and on the part of Freeholder Kopacz.
The Board of Education must reconsider this awful appointment and rescind their vote. The Board of Education must begin to put students and teachers first, and stop caring about padding the salaries and pensions of machine politicians and elected political hacks.
There is an old saying: When everyone thinks the same, no one is really thinking.
I respectfully ask: Who was doing the thinking at the Board of Education?
Apparently, No one.
MICHAEL J. ALONSO