Boards May Be Divided. The Superintendent Cannot Be.

When the superintendent sticks her nose into Board member fights, governance of the school district breaks down, and our kids are the ones who pay for it.

Disagreement on a Board of Education isn’t dysfunction. It’s the job. Board members are elected to ask questions, challenge assumptions, and vote their conscience on behalf of taxpayers and students. A Board that agrees on everything isn’t a healthy Board, it’s a rubber stamp, and taxpayers should be worried, not reassured.

The superintendent doesn’t get that luxury. She has one direct body she reports to: the Board of Education acting as a governing body, not any individual member or faction. She owes every member equal access to information, equal access to her time, and the same professional respect -regardless of how they voted or whether they voted her way. Her boss is the Board as an entity. 

Not the president. Not a majority bloc. Not her favorites.

As school board governance consultant Kathryn Ramirez put it in a recent Facebook post: “Boards may be divided, but the superintendent cannot be.” That isn’t a leadership platitude. It’s the whole job description.

When a Superintendent Picks a Side, Everything Rots

Nothing torches a superintendent’s credibility faster than playing favorites. Not an unpopular call. Not a controversial recommendation. Favoritism – even the appearance of it.

Once it starts, the damage cascades fast. Questions get recast as attacks. Oversight gets branded obstruction. Information starts flowing based on loyalty, not need. Trust craters, and the public gets stuck holding the bag.

At that point, the superintendent stops being the district’s chief executive and starts being read as a political operator. That is exactly what’s happened in my town of Randolph.

Randolph Is a Case Study in What Can Go Wrong

Documents released through an OPRA request in the School Ethics Commission proceeding Ron Conti v. Sheldon Epstein pull back the curtain, and what’s behind it isn’t pretty.

Two months after losing his reelection, former Board President Ron Conti, by then a private citizen, filed an ethics complaint against his former colleague Sheldon Epstein. The Commission tossed it outright: no violation of the School Ethics Act, period.

But the exhibits Conti attached told a different story than the one he intended.  They confirmed what regular meeting attendees already suspected. Our Board was divided, and our superintendent had picked a team, actively working against the one member who asked hard questions and refused to rubber-stamp her recommendations. 

According to the released emails:

Then-Board Vice President Amanda Adams: “I’m thinking that we ignore him as much as we can and offer him minimal responses to his questions in public.”

Adams again: “My plan is to suffocate him with my silence.”

Superintendent Jennifer Fano: “I completely agree.”

In her own emails, Fano branded Epstein a “rogue Board member,” refused his requests to meet, and asked the Board for “protection” from him, recasting a Board member’s questions as harassment.

Read together, these aren’t the words of a neutral administrator. They’re the words of someone who’d chosen sides and stopped pretending otherwise.

Agreeing or disagreeing with a Board member’s style is irrelevant. Every elected member carries the same fiduciary duty, the same legal obligation to oversee taxpayer dollars, whether the budget is $10 million or over $1 billion. Every member is entitled to the same information, the same documents, the same access to the district’s one direct employee. Refusing to meet with your boss, in any other workplace, gets you fired for insubordination. And every member is entitled to have their questions answered, fully, and honestly.

Professional Neutrality Isn’t a Suggestion

New Jersey’s governance model runs on independent oversight. That oversight is dead on arrival if information gets filtered through political loyalty.

A superintendent should never get to decide which members earn complete answers, and which get stalled indefinitely; whose concerns are taken seriously and whose are waved off as troublemaking; who counts as a partner and who gets treated as the enemy.

The job is not complicated: same information, same documents, same access, same respect. Every member. Every time. Neutrality isn’t passive – it’s a discipline. It means staying above the fray even when Board members themselves won’t.

The Conti Files Raise an Even Bigger Question

The strangest part of Conti v. Epstein isn’t the complaint. It’s what Conti attached to it.

He filed numerous documents he himself labeled “CONFIDENTIAL” – attorney-client privileged material, executive session records, documents he claimed, “should not be disclosed to any member of the public.” 

He used them as a weapon anyway.

Here’s the problem: by the time he filed, Conti wasn’t a Board member. He was a private citizen. So how did he still have them?

Did he retain confidential district records after leaving office? Was there no offboarding process, something that should have fallen to the superintendent and Board attorney? Did someone still inside the district hand them over? Did his access to Board communications simply never get cut off?

He didn’t get these through an OPRA request like the rest of us would have had to. Most of the public wouldn’t have even known these documents existed to ask for them – and much of it likely would have been withheld as privileged or personnel material, anyway, given Board counsel was copied. The public deserves an answer. Not for political sport, but because confidential Board records belong to the district, not to former officials with no remaining public duties.

And there’s a bitter irony here: in trying to nail one Board member for asking too many questions, Conti’s own filing dragged the district’s internal deliberations into public view – apparently on his own initiative, and at his own discretion.

Leadership Is Measured by Fairness

Every New Jersey superintendent will have to address a divided Board eventually. The good ones understand disagreement is the system working as designed.

They don’t try to silence dissent. They don’t sort members into allies and targets. They don’t help isolate the ones asking inconvenient questions, and they sure don’t work to push members off the Board entirely. They give every member equal access, equal support, equal respect – because that’s not a political call, it’s the job.

The Randolph documents describe an administration that, at least in these exchanges, blew right past that standard. Instead of bridging the Board’s divide, the superintendent became part of it.

Intentional or not, the outcome is identical: trust erodes, relationships fracture, governance fails.

Students Pay the Price

When Board meetings turn into battlegrounds, the mission gets lost. Instead of student achievement, safety, facilities, and fiscal stewardship, the district burns its time and energy managing a manufactured civil war.

That’s the real cost. Students deserve better. Taxpayers deserve better. Board members deserve a superintendent who serves everyone equally – not just the ones who vote yes to her wants.

Professional neutrality isn’t optional. It’s the job.

Kathryn Ramirez got it exactly right:  Boards may be divided.  The superintendent cannot be.

Submitted directly by the author; content reflects their own views