Is the Wall school board the worst job in New Jersey? Here's why no one is running for BOE

WALL - Do you live in Wall? Do you want more of a say in how your local school district is run — that your kids have enough teachers in their school, that the buses are running on time? Do you want a say in how millions of your tax dollars are spent?

Yes, you.

There's a catch. You'll spend hours poring over contracts and budgets, and you won't be able to talk about most of it in public. Your neighbors might scream at you in public, recorded meetings.

Oh, and it's a volunteer job — so you won't get paid a dime.

All you need is three or more friends to write in your name on Election Day, and the glamorous job of serving on the Wall Township Board of Education could be yours!

That's all you need to serve on the nine-member body, which is charged with using a $89 million budget, including a $73 million tax levy, to educate the 3,200 school children in Wall.

For the first time in at least a decade, not a single candidate has filed to run for a seat on the school board this year. It's not a completely unsurprising result: Last year, there were only two candidates vying for three seats on the board and, in 2021, there was just one candidate for three open seats.

It's a stark contrast to just a few years ago: From 2013 to 2018, there were at least five candidates for three open, full-term board seats every year.

"I hear it all the time: 'Why do you do that to yourself? You just get yelled at all the time,'" said Christopher San Fillippo, who declined to run for reelection to the Wall school board after two terms. "Being a school board member is just so different from other elected positions. A lot of people don't understand or take the time to become educated about what a board of education really does."

Without any formally filed candidates, the three seats will go to the three write-in candidates with the highest votes, as long as they're qualified candidates and accept the position. If any of them decline to serve on the board, the position will be appointed by the county superintendent's office, an arm of the Department of Education.

At least one incumbent, Kenneth Wondrack, is running as a write-in candidate. He and Kristen Hodnett, another board member who didn't file for reelection, did not return requests for comment.

More: 'Culture of toxicity': Wall schools' recent football assault charges echo troubled past

'You can really sabotage the process'

In many ways, Wall is a microcosm of a statewide and national trend: In short, nobody wants to run for the school board anymore.

Across New Jersey, voters in 94 municipalities will head to the polls without enough candidates to choose from when it comes to electing members of their local or regional school board, according to an Asbury Park Press review of sample ballots and candidate lists. In 42 of those towns, there isn't a single candidate for at least one seat.

In total, nearly 18% of school boards in New Jersey have less candidates than open seats, and more than 8% of school boards have an open seat without any candidates filing for election. There are also four council races and seven fire district races that don't have enough filed candidates to fill the open seats, including five without any candidates.

"It's not good for our schools, and it's not good for our democracy," said Rutgers University professor Julia Sass-Rubin, director of the public policy program at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy. "It's worrisome, from a democracy and good government perspective, that people would get written in with no debates or discussions. You're putting people into these potentially powerful positions.

And when there are multiple vacancies on a board without any candidates, like in Wall, it can mean a complete shift in a school board's agenda without any transparency, Sass-Rubin said.

"With three people, you really have the power to steer the board in a certain direction. You can really sabotage the process this way — politicize it and take it in a very partisan direction that's not good for the schools or the community."

Of the 94 towns without enough candidates running for school boards, about 62% have more Republican registered voters than Democratic voters — including Wall, where Republicans outnumber Democratic voters by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, according to state voter registration data.

In total, there are 1,804 school board candidates running for 1,487 seats, a ratio of 1.21 candidates to every open seat, according to the New Jersey School Boards Association. It's the lowest ratio in the 10 years since the School Boards Association has been tracking elections. There are 745 open school board seats that will be decided in uncontested elections, according to the association.

The trend continues on a national level: Nearly two-thirds of school board members nationwide said they didn't intend to run for reelection last year, according to a survey and analysis by nonprofit school board training group School Board Partners. In 2016, online election encyclopedia Ballotpedia reported that 70% of incumbents ran for reelection in 2016.

The voters facing candidate shortfalls are predominantly in small towns, with a median population of just 4,606. Only three school boards races are in towns with over 20,000 people.

Wall is the largest, with 26,525 residents and not a single one filing to run for the school board.

'Make school board meetings boring again'

The School Board Partners report cited various reasons leading to board members resigning or declining to run for reelection, including lack of pay (all elected New Jersey school board positions are unpaid), family responsibilities or simply viewing the decision as retirement.

But the growing disinterest in school board service also comes at a time where school board meetings have become the front line in political culture wars, with national policy battles playing out on the local level.

More: 'Vote Bottoms Up': Partisan politics take hold of local school board races

A nationwide reckoning on race and law enforcement after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers was molded into debates over "critical race theory," a collegiate-level interdisciplinary field of study that parents and politicians claimed was being taught to children. Growing awareness and protection of members of the transgender community dovetailed into arguments about policies dictating how, and if, a transgender student's parent should be notified.

"There's an agenda coming from outside these local communities, even outside New Jersey, trying to bring a national agenda to school boards. And that's a tactic that can easily scare potential candidates from running," said Matt Kazmierczak, an Oakland resident and former Republican campaign strategist who now heads up the Education Truth Project, a nonprofit that seeks to combat misinformation and elect "pro-education" candidates. "People need to feel like they won't get attacked just for volunteering in the community."

And then there's Wall.

Like other districts nationwide, parents flocked to school board meetings irate over policies that required students to continue remote learning and wear face masks while in school buildings. But it was far from the first heated quarrel at a Wall school board meeting: In the last two years, the public comment section of school board meetings has played host to screaming matches over a hazing scandal involving the Wall High School football team and a still undisclosed incident on a field trip that the school's principal, left Rosaleen Sirchio, on paid leave that will net her more than $400,000.

More: Wall HS principal will receive a full year salary, $99K payout in separation agreement

They are just the latest scandals in a long line of them. In 2015, former Superintendent James Habel was convicted on official misconduct charges. And in 2017, the district made national headlines after the school's yearbook advisor digitally altered a student's T-shirt to remove a Donald Trump campaign logo. (In interviews, the teacher later said she was directed to make the changes by school administrators — and that she voted for Trump herself.)

Flashback: Wall teen's Trump T-shirt censored in yearbook

And while the most recent Wall scandals have led to fiery, if not nasty, school board meetings, at least they centered around local, community issues, Kazmierczak said. They involved actual situations in Wall schools, involving Wall teachers and administrators, that required action by the school board.

"Every once in a while, there's going to be one big issue for a school board that brings up a lot of strong opinions from people with legitimate concerns for the students and the schools," Kazmierczak said. "But now we're talking about all these national social issues, and asking school board members to discount the opinions of professionals who work in the field."

"There shouldn't be all this attention," he added. "It's time to make school board meetings boring again."

Mike Davis has spent the last decade covering New Jersey local news, marijuana legalization, transportation and a little bit of everything else. He's won a few awards that make his parents very proud. Contact him at mdavis@gannettnj.com or @byMikeDavis on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Wall NJ: Why isn't anyone running for the school board?