Please explain like I'm 5: JCBOE election ballot

Submitted by Affectionate-Buy2539 t3_yf8yh7 in jerseycity

Hi all, first time voting in J.C., and got a sample ballot in the mail. I took a look at it and am wondering about the Board of Education section. I'd like some help to figure this out before I actually vote. (I am out of the loop regarding current discourse surrounding the BOE).

  1. Am I required to vote for BOE members (am I required to vote on all sections of the ballot)?

  2. In the BOE section, there are 3 slots to choose who I want from the list of who is running (7 names total). But the list of who is running has a bracket around the first three and last three people in the potential list. What does the bracket mean? Are they all running as one ticket or are they three different people running from the same stance/group?

  3. Lastly, I'd like a quick way to compare/contrast the stances of the BOE folks running (if I'm required to vote for someone) is there a matrix or grid that displays this quickly? I found some info on my own but it was narrative (paragraph) format so a little hard to compare.

Thank you!

Edit: it looks like I've received the main answers I needed (to questions 1 and 2). Thank you all who posted.

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Comments

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The_Nomadic_Nerd t1_iu2ofyc wrote

The BOE passed a ridiculous budget with absolutely no transparency, so everyone's property taxes (and as a result, rents) went up considerably. All of this and the JC schools are complete shit. It's just textbook corruption.

Noemi Velazquez is the only one running for reelection this year that voted for the increased budget, so she has to be voted out. She's running with 2 other people in a group called "Education Matters."

However, one of the members up for reelection this year that voted against the budget increase is a guy named Alexander Hamilton (I swear that's his real name). He's running with 2 other people, Doris Toni Ervin and Kenny Reyes, are running in a group called "Change for Children." This very unpopular and corrupt budget passed only 5-4, so if Hamilton, Ervin, and Reyes get put onto the BOE, we can at least be sure that taxes/rents won't go up again in 2023. However, if the corrupt ones continue to hold a majority on the BOE, then we can be sure there will be future increases since they wouldn't have faced any consequences.

In short, Alexander Hamilton, Doris Toni Ervin, and Kennys Reyes of Change for Children are for more transparency and against these unjustified budget increases. Remember those 3 names. That's who we vote for.

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BromioKalen t1_iu2waro wrote

Thanks for sharing. I don't have kids in the schools, and sorry I don't want my taxes raised again for a deficient organization that cannot get their shit together. Stop throwing money at a problem that just needs brain power. You'd think as educators, they would figure this out.

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The_Nomadic_Nerd t1_iu409ek wrote

I don’t have kids either and I’d be OK paying higher taxes if the schools were good. The thing is the schools aren’t good and this new budget increase won’t help improve them. This is just textbook corruption.

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glasssa251 t1_iu4jjei wrote

You don't need to be an educator to be on the board of ed. You just need to know someone with money.

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keepseeing444 t1_iu331xx wrote

Wanted to add while there are no guarantees that this year’s Change For Children reps will not turncoat like Noemi Velasquez did stabbing the taxpayers in the back last year voting YES to near $1B budget and now flipped to Education Matters slate that is funded by the union aka JCEA, NJEA, Jersey City Together or some variation thereof, rest assured we have a board member who is named after a founding father who has always voted with his heart against the budget increase. In 2020 he was the lone dissent 8-1 vote. In 2021 he was dissent in 6-3 vote. And most recently NO vote in $1B budget. And just as an FYI total enrollment in JC public schools including charters has dropped the last 5 years but BOE increased the budget near 50% in the same timeframe and they have used desperate parents with children in schools without drinkable water and leaky roofs that they willfully ignored for years despite more money being poured in, as marionettes. And when you see the same sheep copy and paste tired old links from well known pro budget and union activist civicparent.org or jcitytimes.com to spread the “underfunded” or “first time in years the schools are fully funded” spin please smack them in the face for being the mouthpiece of very people who want to steal from your hard earned paychecks every pay period.

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doglywolf t1_iu4p7oc wrote

When i found out the state had been running the BOE for years up till a few years ago and a lot of these people are legacy BOE members who were collecting 6 figure checks for only doing 1/3rd of their actual job i realized they probably all have to go .

You can't give people super easy 6 figure jobs then actually think they do the work after years of not having to do it.

They had to have local BOE members to handle staffing issues , compliance and HR stuff mostly

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Zugzool t1_iu2g8qy wrote

  1. You don’t have to fill in all sections, and can skip the BOE part.

  2. You pick three. The people in the brackets are different people but running with the same stance/policies.

  3. You can find articles elsewhere on Reddit. The very over-simplified version is that the schools are kinda meh but also super expensive to run (as a result of the state cutting back its funding). “Education Matters” candidates are backed by the teachers union and would attempt to prioritize quality of education. They are also the current group with control over the board. By comparison, “Change for Children” is backed by private individuals/developers, and is more focussed on trying to control costs (taxes went up a ton this year, which squeezes homeowners and indirectly filters down to higher rents). There are also unaffiliated candidates who have no real shot at winning. I encourage you to do your own research, but the main issue seems to boil down to the side you trust most to hit the correct balance on spending/quality.

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Blecher_onthe_Hudson t1_iu2jmqi wrote

>The very over-simplified version is that the schools are kinda meh fucking awful but also super expensive to run (as a result of the state cutting back it’s funding decades of generous contracts because we weren't the ones paying). “Education Matters” candidates are backed by the teachers union and would attempt to prioritize quality of education staff pay and benefits. They are also the current group with control over the board.

Fixed this for you. As I posted elsewhere today, the fact that maintenance staff make more than 98% of their NJ peers, teacher 92%, and the district ranks 11th percentile (bottom) in extracurricular spending tells you all you need to know about Education Matters priorities.

The fact that Change For Children is backed by developers doesn't mean that no one should stand up to the idea that unions should control our schools.Someone has to! One could even argue they're literally more invested in JC's future than school staff who live in the suburbs.

Data source: https://www.nj.gov/education/guide/2022/ind.shtml

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SyndicalistCPA t1_iu4c2vp wrote

Why are you making an issue on teacher's pay and not the bloat administrative positions?

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Blecher_onthe_Hudson t1_iu4y7vw wrote

Just pointing out the lowest hanging fruit, even with bloated admin staff there's still a lot more teachers, that's where most of the money goes.

I have a mea culpa, I already admitted I'm not an Excel wiz, I was misreading the spreadsheet about which was the most recent data and quoted from 2019-20. But it raises more questions.

From file CSG3.xlsx at https://www.nj.gov/education/guide/2022/ind.shtml, The teachers salaries went from 85/92 in 2019-20, to 55/92 in 2021-22! That's quite a shift in a scenario with 92 datapoints. It says the actual cost per student dropped from $10,807 to $10,120. Seems way more likely to me they're cooking the books not cutting payroll. Are you actually a CPA? Do you know how to fix these files so they can be re-sorted?

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SyndicalistCPA t1_iu5vmzi wrote

Did you export the file onto your desktop? Not really sure what you want to accomplish

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Blecher_onthe_Hudson t1_iu6bkbf wrote

I'm trying to see how we spend more than anyone else in the nation on our school system. Sorting helps understand the context. Say we are near the top of our group in teacher salaries, but what if the group only varies by a few percent, then that's not conclusive of much, right? But without sorting by spending, that's hard to see.

I downloaded the files since they no longer allow you to view the data online as in the past.

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SyndicalistCPA t1_iu6nhy5 wrote

I'd have to know which file you are looking at but the one file I clicked already had filters on. Inside the filter you can sort by "largest to smallest". Not sure if that helps or how familiar you are with excel.

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Blecher_onthe_Hudson t1_iu714g9 wrote

Those filters do not apparently function in spreadsheets other than actual Excel, which is often not owned by people like me who have no reason to invest in the MS pro suite. In LibreOffice (open source) I get this error "Ranges containing merged cells can only be sorted without formats." I managed to get them to sort in Google Sheets, but not by those filters. So I need to download the files, then upload them to google!

Government agencies should not publish data in proprietary formats. Jersey City distributed a sheet about boiler inspections in a Word doc instead of a PDF! Yes, I know PDF is originally Adobe, but at this point there's many readers/writers and I've never had a problem with it. Word often has problems with interoperability, as apparently does Excel.

But, to get back to your inquiry as to why focus on teachers rather than bloated admin staff and salaries: teacher are 56% of the overall budget while admin is 8%. I shouldn't need to tell a CPA to follow the money!

Have you ever taken a look at the JCPS "user friendly budget"? I did. I found line item terms that Google couldn't define!

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bodhipooh t1_iu2wkkl wrote

>The very over-simplified version is that the schools are […] super expensive to run (as a result of the state cutting back its funding)

This is a bold faced lie, plain and simple. I hope OP realizes that and is not swayed by this misinform.

The school budget has nothing to do with the state cuts. The BOE sets the budget. Whether the state contributes 10%, 40%, or 90%, the budget remains the same. The only thing that changes is how much the residents have to contribute towards the schools budget via taxation. But, what the JC BOE spends per pupil is nothing short of outrageous and abusive. We are now spending 33K per student.

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Affectionate-Buy2539 OP t1_iu4asc2 wrote

I have my own opinions re education so I'm mostly paying attention to info here about navigating the ballot. (Also why I didn't roll up and just ask who to vote for. But I realize I can't control if responses are tangential--reddit threads gonna reddit thread).

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FloatingWeight t1_iu2ntwl wrote

The BoE raised the school budget and the state cut funding but they are two separate things.

It would be equivalent to taking a pay cut at work and spending more at the same time

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Affectionate-Buy2539 OP t1_iu2ngxf wrote

Thank you! This was really helpful (especially the brackets explanation).

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Goodbye_Sky_Harbor t1_iu49un8 wrote

His summary was really good. It does basically come down to do you want the real estate backed candidates or the teachers union backed candidates. Choose your fighter.

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The_Nomadic_Nerd t1_iu5gzgd wrote

Well we've seen the union backed candidates already, so that kind of narrows it down...

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