A Letter To The Editor From Former Berkeley Board Of Ed Member Dawn Parks

A Letter to the Editor from Dawn M. Parks.

Some Board of Education members running in Berkeley Township for election this year are extremely poor custodians of our tax dollars.

An example of this wasting of our school money is the unethical behavior of Jennifer Leicht. When she did not get her way on Central Regional Board of Education matters, Leicht encouraged people to start six lawsuits against the Board of Education.

It's unethical for a board member to encourage such lawsuits because they cost the taxpayers money that the board member can better use for the benefit of the children and taxpayers. These six frivolous lawsuits so far, thanks to Leicht, have cost the taxpayers $189,767.50.

A copy of the summary of the fees and expenses of these frivolous lawsuits is attached to this letter. But that is not surprising, since she is running with Lou Tuminaro, one of the biggest waster of tax dollars on political patronage history in Berkeley Township.

He and his fellow Berkeley Township school members could have appointed the highly experienced and successful Central Regional uperintendent as the superintendent of the Berkeley Township school district for nothing.

Instead, the Tuminaro gang appointed a man with no prior experience as a superintendent for an extremely generous salary. The Tuminaro gang later divided the responsibilities of the new superintendent into two separate high paying jobs. Tuminaro could have had both jobs filled by Central Regional administrators for nothing, but Tuminaro and his Berkeley Township gang insisted on wasting the taxpayers' money to build their political patronage empire.

In the process, they gave the Berkeley superintendent the biggest salary increase of any administrator in the history of Berkeley Township, and, at the start of his new contract provided more funding for the Berkeley superintendent's salary than the New Jersey governor received.

The Tuminaro gang also added insult to injury by creating the position of assistant superintendent, a position that had been eliminated as unnecessary by Freeholder Joseph Vicari years ago. The responsibilities of that position could have been carried out by an administrator from Central Regional school district at a minimal cost to the taxpayers.

The Tuminaro gang also could have filled the patronage jobs of executive director of physical facilities and supervisor of pupil transportation with the counterpart administrators at Central Regional at a great savings of money for the taxpayers.

No one had to be fired to eliminate these costly redundant vacancies. All these redundant jobs could have been eliminated by attrition, but greed trumped the best interests of the people. The Tuminaro gang choose to fleece the taxpayers to perpetuate unnecessary high paying political patronage jobs for their political machine.

When you add together the above wasteful spending schemes of both Leicht and Tuminaro, including salaries and generous fringe benefits, you are talking about a million dollars that could be spent for tax relief and for needed programs for our children.

Let's stop this waste. Let's instead put our children and taxpayers first by voting for Donnie Clyburn (3H), Matthew G. Parks (4H), and John Paul Sisler (5H) for the Central Regional School Board. To stop the very wasteful hiring practices at the Berkeley Township school district vote for Michele Shedlock(1I), Marguerite Penn (2I), and Cathy Janiak (3I).