Lakewood BOE meetings are the only still not in-person locally, making parents get creative

LAKEWOOD - Gathering at a restaurant to watch a major event on a big-screen television is usually reserved for Super Bowls and soccer matches.

But on Wednesday night, as young children played and teenagers stared at their cellphones, 32 Lakewood parents huddled around a 75-inch screen to watch the latest Lakewood Board of Education meeting via Zoom.

Lakewood remains the only district in the Asbury Park Press coverage area that has not returned to in-person board meetings since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.

Without an in-person option, the parents decided to make their voices heard by gathering together to participate in the remote meeting at a local restaurant.

Alejandra Morales, head of the advocacy group, Voz Latina, organized the gathering to bring what she called  the rise of bullying in Lakewood schools to the board’s attention.

But despite their effort, the parents never had the chance to join the meeting because the Zoom link through which the public should be able to make comments was not placed on the district website in time.

“This is the very first time that the board doesn’t upload the Zoom link for the public to participate,” said Andrew Meehan, a community leader from Bergen County who has helped Lakewood residents with housing and school board issues.

While the meeting was airing live, Meehan, who was not at the restaurant, called the board and told its members that a group of parents were together trying to voice their concerns, but no Zoom link had been provided. Meehan let the board know that parents were with Morales and asked the board to get in contact with her.

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Superintendent Laura Winters apologized for not including the Zoom link on the district’s website, and board attorney Michael Inzelbuch called Morales while the meeting was airing.

“Right now, the situation (bullying) is affecting many kids,” Morales told Inzelbuch as she held her phone and a microphone next to each other so the crowd could listen. “We are looking for help, we are looking for the board to work together with the parents,” she added.

Morales then said the board needed to hold in-person meetings, particularly given the technology needed to participate, to give Lakewood parents the opportunity to speak to the board and address a host of pressing issues.

Over 90% of Lakewood students are Latinos, and all qualify for free or reduced lunch meals. Digna Tapia, a district parent and community leader, said that unlike Latinos from other parts of the state, many  Lakewood parents don’t have internet access. The majority are first generation immigrants that work as domestic and construction workers, some of whom never finished high school, she said.

The remote meetings have been a barrier to their participation and ability to connect with each other, and Inzelbuch agreed to schedule an in-person meeting with parents and Winters. No date has been set.

Once the school board meeting ended at 8 p.m., the parents stayed for two more hours brainstorming their next course of action.

After passing the microphone around, they discussed solutions to the bullying culture that they said has been increasing among middle and high school students. They agreed to go to the school principal's offices to ask that the district to pay more attention to bullying, contemplated their legal options and stressed the need to increase communication with their kids to identify risks.

Norma Morales, a parent, said that school buses drop off students some 15 to 30 minutes before the high school opens. “It has become common for altercations to happen in that time frame between the students being dropped and the school opening because there is no supervision."

Another parent, Sofia Paredes, said she sends her son 30 minutes late to school every day to prevent him from getting caught in any trouble.

She said that while she has limited means she spends $300 a month to send him to school via taxi, a precaution she has taken since last year when a student shot her son in the right eye with a paintball gun as he was arriving home. He lost partial vision in the eye and needed stiches, Paredes said.

Meehan said he hopes that the missing Zoom link was an accident, rather than intentional, but if it happens again he said would pursue legal remedies.

At the onset of the pandemic, in March 2020, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy declared a state of emergency and the state enacted a legal framework to specifically allow public bodies to conduct remote public meetings during the state of emergency.

The state Department of Community Affairs published a notice in September 2020 saying that in-person public meetings remain the default and that remote meetings “are meant to be held under limited circumstances when the declared emergency prevents a public meeting from safely being held in a physical location.”

Most New Jersey districts, including neighboring Howell, Brick and Toms River returned to in-person meetings by June 2021.

Juan Carlos Castillo is a reporter covering everything Lakewood. He delves into politics, social issues and human-interest stories. Reach out to him at JcCastillo@gannett.com

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Lakewood NJ parents still watch school board meetings on Zoom