
Parent Letter to Board of Education on Zoom Access
The following is an email provided to BHCW from Berkeley Heights Resident and Parent Michael Leblond to the Berkeley Heights Board of Education on the 04/15/2024 Meeting. Dear members of the Berkeley Heights Board of Education, I read about the meeting this past Monday night, the actions taken by the Berkeley Heights Board of Education both astounded and disappointed as...

The District Continues to Tear Away at Family Engagement
At the 8/10 Board meeting Bradford, Cianciulli, Hyman, Stanley, Young, and Penna voted to abolish POLICY 9100. Per the agenda, the policy to be abolished was listed as “9100 Public Relations.” Per the BHPS Policy Manual, policy 9100 is “School-Community Relations Goals.” Policy 9120 is “Public Relations Program.” If they don’t sound similar, it’s because they are not. One is regarding communication...

Add Music to the List of Casualties Under Dr. Varley’s Reign of Error
Dr. Varley Continues to Build on Her Incredible Record of Harmful Decisions -Ekin Najarian Instead of using the opportunity of two open Assistant Superintendent Positions to prevent further cuts and teacher transfers, the District has decided to compromise our Music Program. Ms. Lim teaches Music at Woodruff and Mary Kay and is highly regarded by families in both schools, The...

Possible Factors Connected to the Decline of Berkeley Heights Schools: Family Engagement
My Fourth Email to the BOE on Possible Causes for the Decline and Suggestion on How to Repair Them A tremendous body of evidence supports family engagement as necessary for successful outcomes in human services. Many studies have pointed to family engagement as leading to higher academic achievement, pro-social behaviors, and interpersonal effectiveness. In its review of 51 Studies on...

The Berkeley Height Public School Survey Problem
And what we can do to fix it. Surveys are an essential tool that systems can use to gather vital information to know more about the people they are serving to better meet needs and determine whether what they are doing now is effective. Asking for information about age, ethnicity, culture, sexuality, religion, religiosity, and habits are common practices and...

What Teachers, Parents and Students Need to Prepare For
A BHCW Public Service Announcement During the last Night Watch episode, Shauna shared a comment a teacher made after the 03/30/2023 BOE Meeting: “Great…now they are going to pit teachers against Administrators.” The facts connected to the number of positions in the Superintendent’s and Business Administrators’ office discussed publicly, along with public demands at the last BOE Meeting that these...

The only Source of Misinformation in our Community is District Administration
The Superintendent Needs to stop Manufacturing False Crises She then Pretends to Resolve while Blaming the Community. Yesterday Shauna published an article that pointed to the very words the Superintendent said at the last budget meeting that reasonably led to many in our community believing cuts to AP classes were on the horizon. When you take those words and past...

Petition claims that cuts to AP Classes are Looming for Governor Livingston
UPDATE: Cuts to classes with low enrollment have been confirmed. How many classes being cut is unclear A petition entitled “Governor Livingston High School Budget Cuts to AP Courses” indicates that “The planned budget cuts by the Board of Education will remove AP courses such as AP Physics and AP Italian from the Governor Livingston High School curriculum.” We are...

Natasha’s Comments During the 03/13/2023 BOE Meeting on Building Thinking Classroom and the OPRA Custodian Position
In this merge of two clips from the 03/13/2023 Booard of Education meeting, Natasha Joly challenges Ms. Stanley’s continued invalidating spin on Building Thinking classroom. In addition to parents having to subsidize the District’s failure by paying for outside math tutors, Natasha discusses her concern in hearing feedback from parents that students are simply dropping out of math or taking...

The Screws Continue to Tighten
The District Takes Further Steps in Muting the Voices of Community Members Earlier this year community members discovered that the BOE made a decision to make a practice of violating it’s own policies every meeting by preventing residents from coming up a second time and a potential freedom of speech infraction by the BOE attorney when he informed a resident...